Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.

racial reasoning discourages moral reasoning.

Avoid the precepts of those thinkers whose reasoning is not confirmed by experience.

For with regard to nature, it is indeed experience which supplies us with the rule and is the source of truth; with regard to moral laws, however, experience is, alas!, but the mother of illusion; and it is altogether reprehensible either to derive or to try to limit the laws of what we ought to do from what is done.

[T]o remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature.

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

It is almost impossible to substitute intelligence for experience.

Simply to acquiesce in skepticism can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

We cannot live by reason alone.

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.