All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.

What a difficult thing it is to ask someone's advice on a matter without coloring his judgment by the way in which we present our problem.

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.

On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.

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

What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.

What reason have atheists for saying that we cannot rise again? That what has never been, should be, or that what has been, should be again? Is it more difficult to come into being than to return to it.