The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history. And, in general, only that history is history which might also be fable.
The Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and ends with the everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of every man should be a Bible.
Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion.
The more sinful man feels himself, the more Christian he is.
Christianity is opposed to science, to art, to enjoyment in the proper sense.
It goes forth from the common man. It inspires the great majority of the limited on earth.
It is the germ of all democracy, the highest fact in the domain of the popular.
Light is the symbol of genuine self-possession. Therefore light, according to analogy, is the action of the self-contact of matter. Accordingly, day is the consciousness of the planet, and while the sun, like a god, in eternal self-action, inspires the centre, one planet after another closes one eye for a longer or shorter time, and with cool sleep refreshes itself for new life and contemplation. Accordingly, here, too, there is religion. For is the life of the planets aught else but sun-worship?
The Holy Ghost is more than the Bible. This should be our teacher of religion, not the dead, earthly, equivocal letter.
All faith is miraculous, and worketh miracles.
Sin is indeed the real evil in the world. All calamity proceeds from that. He who understands sin, understands virtue and Christianity, himself and the world.
The greatest of miracles is a virtuous act.
If a man could suddenly believe, in sincerity, that he was moral, he would be so.
We need not fear to admit that man has a preponderating tendency to evil. So much the better is he by nature, for only the unlike attracts.
Everything distinguished (peculiar) deserves ostracism. Well for it if it ostracizes itself. Everything absolute must quit the world.
A time will come, and that soon, when all men will be convinced that there can be no king without a republic, and no republic without a king; that both are as inseparable as body and soul. The true king will be a republic, the true republic a king.
In cheerful souls there is no wit. Wit shows a disturbance of the equipoise.
Most people know not how interesting they are, what interesting things they really utter. A true representation of themselves, a record and estimate of their sayings, would make them astonished at themselves, would help them to discover in themselves an entirely new world.
Man is the Messiah of Nature.
The soul is the most powerful of all poisons. It is the most penetrating and diffusible stimulus.
Every sickness is a musical problem; the cure is the musical solution.
Inoculation with death, also, will not be wanting in some future universal therapy.