Your dunce who can’t do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.
God, immortality, duty – how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.
It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.
A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.
Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?
When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.
Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.
My childhood was full of deep sorrows – colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
Better a false belief than no belief at all.
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.
Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.
The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of the times, a chief obstacle to true culture.
A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions; about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest.
The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.
Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman’s heart has holier idols.
The best part of a woman’s love is worship; but it is hard to her to be sent away with her precious spikenard rejected, and her long tresses, too, that were let fall, ready to soothe the wearied feet.
It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.
Man cannot choose his duties.
The idea of duty – that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self – is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.