Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason.

To deny, to believe, and to doubt well, are to a man what the race is to a horse.

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.

Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.

Jesus was in a garden, not of delight as the first Adam, in which he destroyed himself and the whole human race, but in one of agony, in which he saved himself and the whole human race.

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all one wants.

We must make good people wish that the Christian faith were true, and then show that it is.