The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.

. . . 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.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

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.