There is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny, to which obedience and worship are due.

Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse.

Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import.

A moral principle is not a command to act or to forbear acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, not by the rule as such.

To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions--that is art.

To have an idea of a thing is not just to get certain sensations from it. It is to be able to respond to the thing in view of its place in an inclusive scheme of action; it is to foresee the drift and probable consequence of the action of the thing upon us and of our action upon it.

To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn.