Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any pointand to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us.

If god does not exist, one loses nothing by believing in him anyway, while if he does exist, one stands to lose everything by not believing.

On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at Court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.

To scorn philosophy is truly to philosophize.

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

Man governs himself more by impulse than reason