Quote collection
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"The God of Christians is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and his infinite mercy; who unites himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than himself."
"All the maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice."
"Happiness can be found neither in ourselves nor in external things, but in God and in ourselves as united to him."
"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."
"Force rules the world-not opinion; but it is opinion that makes use of force."
"Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true."
"Eloquence is a way of saying things in such a way, first, that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure, and second, that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it."
"It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles."
"The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it."
"We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own."
"Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death."
"Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small."
"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."
"The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men."
"There are plenty of maxims in the world; all that remains is to apply them."
"To doubt is a misfortune, but to seek when in doubt is an indispensable duty. So he who doubts and seeks not is at once unfortunate and unfair."
"It is certain that those who have the living faith in their hearts see at once that all existence is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, [if we were to show them our proofs of the existence of God] nothing is more calculated to arouse their contempt. . . ."
"Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being."
"Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object which delights us."
"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason."