[On vanity:] The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.

Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are established.

There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that.

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

The secrets of nature are concealed; her agency is perpetual, but we do not always discover its effects; time reveals them from age to age; and although she is always the same in herself, she is not always equally well known.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.