 All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. |
| Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious. |
| True virtue is life under the direction of reason. |
| So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it. |
| The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. |
| God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. |
| Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. |
| The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue. |
| Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. |
| Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts. |
| How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. |
| We feel and know that we are eternal. |
| All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love. |
| None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not. |
| Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause. |
| I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. |
| I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion. |
| Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow. |
| There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope. |
| Desire is the essence of a man. |
