the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.

This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.