If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

A person has two passions for love and abhorrence. A big disposition to excessiveness has just a love, because it is more ardent and stronger.

Before examining this more carefully and investigating its consequences, I want to dwell for a moment in the contemplation of God, to ponder His attributes in me, to see, admire, and adore the beauty of His boundless light, insofar as my clouded insight allows. Believing that the supreme happiness of the other life consists wholly of the contemplation of divine greatness, I now find that through less perfect contemplation of the same sort I can gain the greatest joy available in this life.

For each of us there is a set limit to our intellectual powers which we cannot pass.

Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.

What then is the source of my errors? They are owing simply to the fact that, since the will extends further than the intellect, I do not contain the will within the same boundaries; rather, I also extend it to things I do not understand. Because the will is indifferent in regard to such matters, it easily turns away from the true and the good; and in this way I am deceived and I sin.

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.