Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

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

The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost thinking about it.

I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.

No one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

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.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.