Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.

A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.

If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.

Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals.

Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.