People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.