The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.