Quote collection
727 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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, ineffectual. From the depths of his soul now comes at once boredom, gloom, sorrow, chagrin, resentment and despair."
"Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first."
"If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past or the future."
"Good deeds, when concealed, are the most admirable."
"The property of power is to protect."
"No one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true."
"If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!"
"It has pleased God that divine verities should not enter the heart through the understanding, but the understanding through the heart."
"Let it not be imagined that the life of a good Christian must be a life of melancholy and gloominess; for he only resigns some pleasures to enjoy others infinitely better."
"Christian piety annihilates the egoism of the heart; worldly politeness veils and represses it."
"Vanity is but the surface."
"To understand is to forgive."
"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 know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart."
"There is no arena in which vanity displays itself under such a variety of forms as in conversation."
"Excuse me, pray." Without that excuse I would not have known there was anything amiss."
"Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."
"We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others."
"How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired."
"The mind has its arrangement; it proceeds from principles to demonstrations. The heart has a different mode of proceeding."