"Mary was conceived without sin. Behold! what the Church of Paris glories in professing and maintaining; what her Doctors hold it an honor to teach and defend; what her children are jealous of preserving as one of their dearest possessions after the sacred dogmas of faith; what they do not hesitate to regard as an immediate consequence of their faith, not believing it possible to separate in Mary, the title of Immaculate Virgin from that of Virgin Mother of God, and not considering it possible to refuse the privilege of a Conception without spot, to her who was to receive and who indeed did receive, that of the divine Maternity."

"Islam is going through a crisis by contact with the Western world, and under the influence of Christianity many of the enlightened Turks dream of reforming its morals. On the other hand there has always been a certain opposition between the Arabs, who pretend to represent the pure Mussulman tradition, and the Turks."

"Hermite was born in 1822, four years before Riemann. Now in his sixties, he had become one of the standard-bearers for Cauchy and Riemann's work on functions of imaginary numbers. Cauchy's influence on Hermite went beyond mathematics. As a young man Hermite had been an agnostic, but Cauchy, a devout Roman Catholic, had caught Hermite in a weak moment during a severe illness and had converted him to Catholicism. The result was a strange mix of mathematical mysticism, akin to the cult of the Pythagoreans. Hermite believed that mathematical existence was some supernatural state which mortal mathematicians were only occasionally allowed to glimpse."

"Stoicism, which generally disappeared as the official School, was the most important of the Hellenistic elements in the semi-oriental religions of vanishing paganism."

"Nou goth sonne under wode,— Me reweth, Marie, thi faire Rode. Nou goth sonne under tre,— Me reweth, Marie, thi sone and the."