The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.

It is good to be tired and wearied by the futile search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.

Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?

Justice and truth are two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

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.