"It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants."

"The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first."

"Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just."

"If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists."

"Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere."

"That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it."

"Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools."

"The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice."

"Faith is a sounder guide than reason. Reason can go only so far but faith has no limits."

"There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws."

"Justice is what is established; and thus all our established laws will necessarily be regarded as just without examination, since they are established."

"When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair."

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

"Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."

"All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling."

"If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?"

"The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death."

"He no longer loves the person whom he loved ten years ago. I quite believe it. She is no longer the same, nor is he. He was young, and she also; she is quite different. He would perhaps love her yet, if she were what she was then."

"I do not admire the excess of a virtue like courage unless I see at the same time an excess of the opposite virtue, as in Epaminondas, who possessed extreme courage and extreme kindness. We show greatness not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between."

"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."

"Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same."

"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room."

"Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm."

"The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy."

"When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing."

"All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling."

"The heart has reasons which reason cannot understand."

"The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men."

"I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room."

"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason."

"We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured."

"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."

"When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person."

"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 billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him."

"I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter."

"We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart."

"Our own interests are still an exquisite means for dazzling our eyes agreeably."

"Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true."

"God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality."

"If we all told what we know of one another there would not be four friends in the world."

"As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all."

"There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous."

"If you want people to think well of you do not speak well of yourself."

"Love has reasons which reason cannot understand."

"The last thing one knows when writing a book is what to put first."

"It is good to be tired and wearied by the futile search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer."

"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."

"To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize."

"The virtue of a man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his every-day conduct."

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."