Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing.

The proper study of a wise man is not how to die but how to live.

Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

The less the mind understands and the more things it perceives, the greater its power of feigning is; and the more things it understands, the more that power is diminished.