Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.

Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it.

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.