"Brilliance is born of desperation."

"The prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the Italian painting of the martyr whose intestines are slowly being unwound from his body on a reel."

"Into blinding darkness enter those who worship ignorance and those who delight in knowledge enter into still greater darkness, as it were."

"Few ever live to old age, and fewer still ever became distinguished, who were not in the habit of early rising."

"It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can."

"Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith."

"The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion."

"A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes."

"The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself."

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."

"Angels dancing on the head of a pin dissolve into nothingness at the bedside of a dying child."

"It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation."