The arithmetical machine produces effects that approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing that would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God

We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.

The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality.

Orthodoxy on one side of the Pyrenees may be heresy on the other.