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 implore the mercy of God, not that He may leave us at peace in our vices, but that He may deliver us from them |
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart. |
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 like to be deceived. |
We must learn our limits. We are all something but none of us are everything. |
We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so. |
We never, then, love a person, but only qualities |
We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting. |
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. |
We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike. |
Weariness.Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptin |
What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe |
What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire. |
What is man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, all in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything |