Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.
That is why those to whom God has given religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate, and feel quite legitimately convinced, but to those who do not have it we can only give such faith through reasoning, until God gives it by moving their heart, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation.
What is wonderful, incomparable and wholly divine is that this religion which has always survived has always been under attack.
I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.
What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.
The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus, we never actually live, but hope to live.
The Jesuits have tried to combine God and the world, and have only earned the contempt of God and the world.
We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world; this is evident from the quarrels caused by occasional indiscreet disclosures.
If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.
Denying, believing and doubting are to men what running is to horses.
What a great advantage to be of noble birth, since it gives a man of eighteen the standing, recognition and respect that another man might not earn before he was fifty. That means winning thirty years’ start with no effort.
I can certainly imagine a man without hands, feet, or head, for it is only experience that teaches us that the head is more necessary than the feet. But I cannot imagine a man without thought; he would be a stone or an animal.
What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!
What then is man to do in this state of affairs? Is he to doubt everything, to doubt if he is awake, whether he is being pinched or burned? Is he to doubt whether he is doubting, to doubt whether he exists? No one can go that far, and I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed.
For a religion to be true it must have known our nature; it must have known its greatness and smallness, and the reason for both. What other religion but Christianity has known this?
It may be that there are such things as true proofs, but it is not certain.
Just as we talk of poetic beauty, so we should also talk of mathematical beauty and medicinal beauty. But we do not talk like that for the very good reason that we know what the object of mathematics is, namely proof; and what the object of medicine is, namely cure; but we do not know what constitutes the attraction which is the object of poetry.
Multiplicity which is not reduced to unity is confusion. Unity which does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny.