Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.

It can do truth no service to blind the fact, known to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work not only of men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected the Christian faith.

I know tolerably well what Ireland was, but have a very imperfect idea of what Ireland is.

... the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.

It is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side. And I denounce and reprobate this pretension not the less, if put forth on the side of my most solemn convictions.

The great creative individual . . . is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.

Trade is a social act.