My own feeling of concern arises from seeing how much moral injury and suffering is created by the superstitions of the Christian mythology.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit. It is the moral atmosphere in which human beings are to live and move. Men do not live to breathe: they breathe to live.

it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

When once experience taught me that I could work when I chose, and within a quarter of an hour of my determining to do so, I was relieved, in a great measure, from those embarrassments and depressions which I see afflicting many an author who waits for a mood instead of summoning it, and is the sport, instead of the master, of his own impressions and ideas.

[I] wish that the land-tax went a little more according to situation than it does. 'Tis really ridiculous, how one has to pay five times as much as another, without any reason that ever I heard tell.

It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.

I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.