Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval.

By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may make advances in morality (which is the science, by way of eminence, of living well and being happy), but all mankind together is making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older. So that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man who never ceases to live and learn.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.

Flies are so mighty that they win battles, paralyse our minds, eat up our bodies.