High original genius is always ridiculed on its first appearance; most of all by those who have won themselves the highest reputation in working on the established lines. Genius only commands recognition when it has created the taste which is to appreciate it.

Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.

Instruction does not prevent wasted time or mistakes; and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.

A single seed of fact will produce in a season or two a harvest of calumnies; but sensible men will pay no attention to them.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty

There are at bottom but two possible religions--that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.