When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. ...such community of intellect that we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

The statements of atheists ought to be perfectly clear of doubt. Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material.

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality.

Any unity which doesn't have its origin in the multitudes is tyranny.