Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

The weakness of human reason appears more evidently in those who know it not than in those who know it.

Nothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so formidable to him as eternity. And thus it is unnatural that thereshould be men indifferent to the loss of their existence and to the perils of everlasting suffering.

We do not rest satisfied with the present.... So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not thinkof the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us.

Those great efforts of intellect, upon which the mind sometimes touches, are such that it cannot maintain itself there. It only leaps to them, not as upon a throne, forever, but merely for an instant.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?