I know how well you have succeeded in making your earthly life so rich and varied, that you no longer stand in need of an eternity. Having made a universe for yourselves, you are above the need of thinking of the universe that made you.
On every subject, however small and unimportant, you would most willingly be taught by those who have devoted to it their lives and their powers. ... How then does it come about that, in matters of religion alone, you hold every thing the more dubious when it comes from those who are experts?
Piety ... helped me as I began to sift the faith of my fathers and to cleanse thought and feeling from the rubbish of antiquity. When the God and the immortality of my childhood vanished from my doubting eyes it remained to me. Without design of mine it guided me into active life. It showed me how, with my endowments and defects, I should keep myself holy in an undivided existence, and through it alone I have learnt friendship and love.
Those proud Islanders whom many unduly honour, know no watchword but gain and enjoyment. Their zeal for knowledge is only a sham fight, their worldly wisdom a false jewel, skilfully and deceptively composed, and their sacred freedom itself too often and too easily serves self-interest. They are never in earnest with anything that goes beyond palpable utility. All knowledge they have robbed of life and use only as dead wood to make masts and helms for their life's voyage in pursuit of gain.
See to it, friend, that you have not lighted upon those who merely follow, and collect, and rest satisfied with what another has furnished ; with them you will never find the spirit of that art:. to the discoverers you must go, on whom it surely rests.
Religion is as far removed, by its whole nature, from all that is systematic as philosophy is naturally disposed to it.
Religion, however, as I wish to show it, which is to say, in its own original, characteristic form, is not accustomed to appear openly, but is only seen in secret by those who love it. Not that this applies to religion alone. Nothing that is essentially characteristic and peculiar can be quite the same as that which openly exhibits and represents it.