It is a dangerous experiment to call in gratitude as an ally to love. Love is a debt which inclination always pays, obligation never.

Faith is a gift of God.

Man's greatness is great in that he knows himself wretched. A tree does not know itself wretched. It is then being wretched to know oneself wretched; but it is being great to know that one is wretched.

Faith is a sounder guide than reason. Reason can only go so far, but faith has no limits.

All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make. Let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds. It will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.

Extremes are for us as if they were not, and as if we were not in regard to them; they escape from us, or we from them.

Muhammad established a religion by putting his enemies to death; Jesus Christ by commanding his followers to lay down their lives.