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.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we love can them. The saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.

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

All is one, all is different. How many natures exist in man? How many vocations? And by what chance does each man ordinarily choose what he has heard praised?