Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

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

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

At the centre of every human being is a God-shaped vacuum which can only be filled by Jesus Christ.

Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.

The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life.

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.