The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God.

I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.

.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.

Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.

There is no fear without some hope, and no hope without some fear.

To comprehend an idea, a person must simultaneously accept it as true. Conscious analysis - which, depending on the idea, may occur almost immediately or with considerable effort - allows the mind to reject what it intially accepted as fact.