Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.