Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

Fear first created the gods.

Docility is the observable half of reason.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.