The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.

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.

In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.