If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all.

All this visible world is but an imperceptible point in the ample bosom of nature.

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

Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then.