Who can doubt that we exist only to love? Disguise it, in fact, as we will, we love without intermission... We live not a moment exempt from its influence.

One-half of the ills of life come because men are unwilling to sit down quietly for thirty minutes to think through all the possible consequences of their acts.

We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

If there were only one religion, God would indeed be manifest.

Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other. But this is not natural. Each keeps its own place.

The imagination enlarges little objects so as to fill our souls with a fantastic estimate; and, with rash insolence, it belittles the great to its own measure, as when talking of God.