There would be too great darkness, if truth had not visible signs.
We have an idea of truth, invincible to all scepticism.
Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.
Amusement allures and deceives us and leads us down imperceptibly in thoughtlessness to the grave.
A jester, a bad character.
How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired.
It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf.
Our reason is always disappointed by the inconstancy of appearances.
When intuition and logic agree, you are always right.
The eternal Being is forever if he is at all.
May God never abandon me.
Some vices only lay hold of us by means of others, and these, like branches, fall on removal of the trunk.
All mankind’s unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.
Necessity, that great refuge and excuse for human frailty, breaks through all law; and he is not to be accounted in fault whose crime is not the effect of choice, but force.
It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power.
Opinion is the queen of the world.
The stream is always purer at its source.
I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.
Nature confuses the skeptics and reason confutes the dogmatists.
Faith affirms many things, respecting which the senses are silent, but nothing that they deny. It is superior, but never opposed to their testimony.