Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too.

Look somewhere else for someone who can follow you in your researches about numbers. For my part, I confess that they are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them.

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.

However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion.

We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known to all the world, even to those who come after us; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six persons immediately around us is enough to amuse and satisfy us.

All men naturally hate one another. I hold it a fact, that if men knew exactly what one says of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.