Without Jesus Christ man must be in vice and misery with Jesus Christ man is free from vice and misery in Him is all our virtue and all our happiness. Apart from Him there is but vice, misery, darkness, death, despair.

What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster... what a contradiction, what a prodigy

It has pleased God that divine verities should not enter the heart through the understanding, but the understanding through the heart.

Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.

On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.

Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.

How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!