The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.

Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.

A great idea goes through three stages on its way to acceptance: 1) it is dismissed as nonsense, 2) it is acknowledged as true, but insignificant, 3) finally, it is seen to be important, but not really anything new.

All religions begin with the cry Help.

The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.