It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it."

For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than th eincreasing discovery of my own ignorance

This result could have been achieved either by his [God] endowing my intellect with a clear and distinct perception of everything about which I would ever deliberate, or simply by impressing the following rule so firmly upon my memory that I could never forget it: I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand.

There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.

Nothing comes out of nothing.

The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.