Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

Assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.