Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic.

. . . to know the order of nature, and regard the universe as orderly is the highest function of the mind.

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.

Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.

Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other things being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.