If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God

No man ever believes with a true and saving faith unless God inclines his heart; and no man when God does incline his heart can refrain from believing.

The statements of atheists ought to be perfectly clear of doubt. Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material.

It is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are unjust; for they obey them only because they think them just. Therefore it isnecessary to tell them at the same time that they must obey them because they are laws, just as they must obey superiors, not because they are just, but because they are superiors. In this way all sedition is prevented.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and naturally loves itself; and it gives itself to one or the other, and hardens itself against one or the other, as it chooses...it is the heart that feels God, not the reason; this is faith.

When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. ...such community of intellect that we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.

Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.