To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed. - Ernest Renan

I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.

Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?

The Semites did not understand the variety, the plurality, the genders in God: the word goddess in Hebrew is the most horrible barbarism.