Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

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