Prayer is of no avail. The lightning falls on the just and the unjust in accordance with natural laws.

The hands that help are better far than lips that pray.

The undressed is vulgar; the nude is pure, and the well-dressed tainted.

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

No God can put a man in hell in another world, who has made a little heaven in this. God cannot make a man miserable if that man has made somebody else happy.

Had he been willing to live a hypocrite, he would have been respectable, he at least could have died surrounded by other hypocrites, and at his death there would have been an imposing funeral, with miles of carriages, filled with hypocrites, and above his hypocritical dust there would have been a hypocritical monument covered with lies.