 Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world. |
| Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects. |
| The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts. |
| Little things console us because little things afflict us. |
| We never love a person, but only qualities. |
| Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones. |
| Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. |
| Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason. |
| It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist. |
| The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him. |
| A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us. |
| Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. |
| Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us. |
| There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus. |
| The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men. |
| We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it. |
| 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. |
| We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it. |
| Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience. |
| If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole? |
