The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.

Spirituality for the most part is a mask worn by idleness, arrogance and greed.

The record of a generous life runs like a vine around the memory of our dead, and every sweet unselfish act is now a perfumed flower.

Do the best that can be done and then . . . be resigned.

Talent has the four seasons: spring, that is to say, the sowing of the seeds; summer, growth; autumn, the harvest; winter, intellectual death. But there is now and then a genius who has no winter, and, no matter how many years he may live, on the blossom of his thought no snow falls. Genius has the climate of perpetual growth.

If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization.

Science built the Academy, superstition the Inquisition.