But Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church-with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility-is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time.

Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

It is horrible! It is not the suffering and the death of the animals that is horrible, but the fact that the man without any need for so doing crushes his lofty feeling of sympathy and mercy for living creatures and does violence to himself that he may be cruel. The first element of moral life is abstinence.

A man can spend several hours sitting cross-legged in the same position if he knows that noting prevents him from changing it; but if he knows that he has to sit with his legs crossed like that, he will get cramps, his legs will twitch and strain towards where he would like to stretch them.

Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find the causes is implanted in man's soul.

Reason unites us, not only with our contemporaries, but with men who lived two thousand years before us, and with those who will live after us.