The Fall is an offense to human reason, but once accepted, it makes perfect sense of the human condition.

If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?

No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth

It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.