The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

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.

Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, "Please strike here!

Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.