Leslie Stephen

"The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact."

"A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance."

"He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view."

"Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season."

"Philistine – a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their sp…"

"The poet should touch our heart by showing his own"

"If you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable now-a-days, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study."

"If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, …"