In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often-times filled with your tears.

And I shall always hold myself more obliged to those by whose favour I enjoy uninterrupted leisure than to any who might offer me the most honourable positions in the world.

By 'God', I understand, a substance which is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else [...] that exists. All these attributes are such that, the more carefully I concentrate on them, the less possible it seems that they could have originated from me alone. So, from what has been said it must be concluded that God necessarily exists.

The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.

How do we know that anything really exists, that anything is really the way it seems ot us through our senses?