Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.

Nature. As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature's most interesting productions-the works of man. Nature is usually taken to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it interests me much less than the other half.

They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.

If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.