Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.
Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest without passion without business without entertainment without care. It is then that he recognizes that he is empty insufficient dependent...
We sail within a vast sphere ever drifting in uncertainty driven from end to end.
Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.
As we are always preparing to be happy it is inevitable that we should never be so.
Man is only a reed the weakest thing in nature but he is a thinking reed.
It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.
Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.
Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billi...
Faith is a sounder guide than reason. Reason can go only so far but faith has no limits.
The virtue of a man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his every-day conduct.
The last thing one knows when writing a book is what to put first.
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.
Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.
I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.
Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.