It has pleased God that divine verities should not enter the heart through the understanding, but the understanding through the heart.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Cold words freeze people, and hot words scorch them, and bitter words make them bitter, and wrathful words make them wrathful. Kind words also produce their own image on men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They smooth, and quiet, and comfort the hearer.

We are only troubled by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves, for they add to the state in which we are the passions of the state in which we are not.

The law required what it could not give. Grace gives that which it requires.

That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature.

It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.