It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
You always admire what you really don't understand.
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.
Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.
If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?
The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.
We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.
We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting.
All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.
The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.
We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.
Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.
Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.
As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.
There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.
The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.
It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.
There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.
Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.
All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.
Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.
We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.
We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.