Like every man who appears at an epoch which is historical and rendered famous by his works, Jesus Christ has a history, a history which the church and the world possess, and which, surrounded by countless memorials, has at least the same authenticity as any other history formed in the same countries, amidst the same peoples and in the same times. As, then, if I would study the lives of Brutus and Cassius, I should calmly open Plutarch, I open the Gospel to study Jesus Christ, and I do so with the same composure.

Love is the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything.

Man forms himself in his own interior, and nowhere else.

Nothing wounds a friend like a want of confidence.

Nothing is achieved without solitude.

The Church had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened with shipwreck.

The intercourse between man and God reposes upon truths of another order than that of reason, upon a light different and more elevated than that which naturally enlightens created intelligences.