Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than the thought of death without peril.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.

Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.

The arithmetical machine produces effects that approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing that would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals.

Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.