Peace is in the grave.
Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet.
No more let life divide what death can join together.
Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle Such lamps within the dome of this dim world That the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle Into the Hell from which it first was furled.
Image of rugged cliffs And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.
Jesus Christ opposed with earnest eloquence the panic fears and hateful superstitions which have enslaved mankind for ages.
The nature of a narrow and malevolent spirit is so essentially incompatible with happiness as to render it inaccessible to the influences of the benignant God.
The emptiness and folly of retaliation are apparent from every example which can be brought forward. Not only Jesus Christ, but the most eminent professors of every sect of philosophy, have reasoned against this futile superstition.
The thoughts which the word “God” suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves.
The conceptions which any nation or individual entertains of the God of its popular worship may be inferred from their own actions and opinions, which are the subjects of their approbation among their fellow-men.
The advocates of literal interpretation have been the most efficacious enemies of those doctrines whose nature they profess to venerate.
This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things.
We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being.
Love’s very pain is sweet.
The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.
My neighbour, or my servant, or my child, has done me an injury, and it is just that he should suffer an injury in return. Such is the doctrine which Jesus Christ summoned his whole resources of persuasion to oppose.
God is a hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof; the onus probandi rests on the theist.
I have drunken deep of joy...
Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.