A man's heart is right when he wills what God wills.

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.

The soul is like an uninhabited world that comes to life only when God lays His head against us.

Evil denotes the lack of good. Not every absence of good is an evil, for absence may be taken either in a purely negative or in aprivative sense. Mere negation does not display the character of evil, otherwise nonexistents would be evil and moreover, a thing would be evil for not possessing the goodness of something else, which would mean that man is bad for not having the strength of a lion or the speed of a wild goat. But what is evil is privation; in this sense blindness means the privation of sight.

Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.

Humility is the mark of a genuine disciple.

Pain itself can be pleasurable accidentally in so far as it is accompanied by wonder, as in stage-plays; or in so far as it recalls a beloved object to one's memory, and makes one feel one's love for the thing, whose absence gives us pain. Consequently, since love is pleasant, both pain and whatever else results from love, in so far as they remind us of our love, are pleasant.