It was decided by the university of Coimbre that the sight of several persons being slowly burned in great ceremony is an infallible secret for preventing earthquakes.

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.

You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

I would rather obey a fine lion, much stronger than myself, than two hundred rats of my own species.

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.