When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference wasthat God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite.--With this I began to do philosophy.
I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism.
Everyone has in him something divine, something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which God offers him to take or refuse. The task is to find it, develop it & use it. The chief aim of education should be to help the growing soul to draw out that in itself which is best and make it perfect for a noble use.
Realize your true nature. That is all there is to do. Know yourself as you are - infinite Spirit. That is practical religion. Everything else is impractical, for everything else will perish.
He must pull out his own eyes, and see no creature, before he can say, he sees no God; He must be no man, and quench his reasonable soul, before he can say to himself, there is no God.
And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.
It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that drives him on beyond women, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone.
I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.
Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry.... Friendship... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me - God of love only knows where.
Only those of tranquil minds, and none else, can attain abiding joy, by realizing within their souls the Being who manifests one essence in a multiplicity of forms.
If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.