Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.

It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.

We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.

...nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.

Renunciation is submission to time.

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.