Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth.