We conceal it from ourselves in vain – we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.
Muhammad established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ by commanding his followers to lay down their lives.
Not the zeal alone of those who seek Him proves God, but the blindness of those who seek Him not.
Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.
We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason.
Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too.
What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.
Nothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so formidable to him as eternity. And thus it is unnatural that thereshould be men indifferent to the loss of their existence and to the perils of everlasting suffering.
Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.
Wisdom leads us back to childhood.
All of our miseries prove our greatness. They are the miseries of a dethroned monarch.
Let each of us examine his thoughts.
The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.
We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.
Something incomprehensible is not for that reason less real.
Which is the more believable of the two, Moses or China?
Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant.
Man is clearly made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. And the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our Author and our end.