If ignorance were bliss, he'd be a blister

If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?

We sometimes learn more from the sight of evil than from an example of good; and it is well to accustom ourselves to profit by the evil which is so common, while that which is good is so rare.

Those whom we call ancient were really new in all things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.