Quote collection
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"Either God exists or He doesn't. Either I believe in God or I don't. Of the four possibilities, only one is to my disadvantage. To avoid that possibility, I believe in God."
"How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!"
"Our own interests are still an exquisite means for dazzling our eyes agreeably."
"The mind naturally makes progress, and the will naturally clings to objects; so that for want of right objects, it will attach itself to wrong ones."
"The statements of atheists ought to be perfectly clear of doubt. Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material."
"The world is satisfied with words. Few appreciate the things beneath. [Fr., Le monde se paye de paroles; peu approfondissement les choses.]"
"The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the most remembered, and the oftener quoted; because it is entirely composed of thoughts born from the common talk of life."
"The Church limits her sacramental services to the faithful. Christ gave Himself upon the cross a ransom for all."
"To find recreation in amusements is not happiness; for this joy springs from alien and extrinsic sources, and is therefore dependent upon and subject to interruption by a thousand accidents, which may minister inevitable affliction."
"Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside."
"As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry."
"How I hate this folly of not believing in the Eucharist, etc.! If the gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there?"
"There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature, such as it is, weak or strong, and the thing which pleases us. Whatever is formed according to this standard pleases us, be it house, song, discourse, verse, prose, woman, birds, rivers, trees, room, dress, and so on. Whatever is not made according to this standard displeases those who have good taste."
"Education produces natural intuitions, and natural intuitions are erased by education."
"Tout notre raisonnement se re duit a' ce der au sentiment. All our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling."
"When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. ...such community of intellect that we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love."
"Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame."
"Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same."
"All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment."
"The God of the infinite is the God of the infinitesimal."