Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
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.
Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.
I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek with groans.
And is it not obvious that, just as it is a crime to disturb the peace when truth reigns, it is also a crime to remain at peace when the truth is being destroyed?
Man’s grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.
If a man is not made for God, why is he happy only in God?
Passion cannot be beautiful without excess; one either loves too much or not enough.
Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.
Happiness can be found neither in ourselves nor in external things, but in God and in ourselves as united to him.
No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth.
Let it not be imagined that the life of a good Christian must be a life of melancholy and gloominess; for he only resigns some pleasures to enjoy others infinitely better.
Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.
There is nothing that we can see on earth which does not either show the wretchedness of man or the mercy of God. One either sees the powerlessness of man without God, or the strength of man with God.
Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.