For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.