The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.

The utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors.

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.