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.

If you want others to have a good opinion of you, say nothing.

To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.

All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ, they all aim at the same end.

If you believe in God you are at no disadvantage in this life, and at considerable advantage in the next. If you do not believe, but find in the next that there was a next, you are most unfortunate!

Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday. You are today where the thoughts of yesterday have brought you and you will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take you.

Nothing is so important to man as his own state; nothing is so formidable to him as eternity. And thus it is unnatural that thereshould be men indifferent to the loss of their existence and to the perils of everlasting suffering.