We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.
We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.
We do not worry about being respected in towns through which we pass. But if we are going to remain in one for a certain time, we do worry. How long does this time have to be?
The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the night of God.
All evil stems from this-that we do. Know how to handle your solitude.
We are troubled only by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves.
If you believe in God you are at no disadvantage in this life, and at considerable advantage in the next. If you do not believe, but find in the next that there was a next, you are most unfortunate!
No animal admires another animal.
Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.
The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.
It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.
Nothing is surer than that the people will be weak.
We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.
Men blaspheme what they do not know.
Fear not, provided you fear; but if you fear not, then fear.
The heart has arguments with which the logic of mind is not aquainted.
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God.
The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.
We must make good people wish that the Christian faith were true, and then show that it is.