Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.