Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

I leave you but the sound of many a wordIn mocking echoes haply overheard,I sang to heaven. My exile made me free,from world to world, from all worlds carried me.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

O world, thou choosest not the better part!It is not wisdom to be only wise,And on the inward vision close the eyes,But it is wisdom to believe the heart.Columbus found a world, and had no chart,Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;To trust the soul's invincible surmiseWas all his science and his only art.