We do not want to think. We do not want to hear. We do not care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money, and let us outshine our neighbors. There is the Nineteenth Century Gospel.

The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.

The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.

Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

Fame has only the span of the day, they say. But to live in the hearts of people-that is worth something.

Christianity ... has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on the rack; all this it has done, and done in the name of God.