Quote collection
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"That queen, of error, whom we call fancy and opinion, is the more deceitful because she does not always deceive. She would be the infallible rule of truth if she were the infallible rule of falsehood; but being only most frequently in error, she gives no evidence of her real quality, for she marks with the same character both that which is true and that which is false."
"Whilst in speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we love can them. The saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through charity."
"How shall one who is so weak in his childhood become really strong when he grows older? We only change our fancies."
"Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable."
"Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?"
"Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday."
"The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy."
"Things are always at their best in their beginning."
"Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long.... This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter."
"The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the night of God."
"The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice."
"Description of man: dependence, longing for independence, need."
"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness."
"All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room."
"We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it."
"Mediocrity makes the most of its native possessions."
"Perfect clarity would profit the intellect but damage the will."
"All men naturally hate one another. I hold it a fact, that if men knew exactly what one says of the other, there would not be four friends in the world."
"Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree."
"We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any pointand to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us."