Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?
It is the contest that delights us, and not the victory.
Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first.
We must kill them in war, just because they live beyond the river. If they lived on this side, we would be called murderers.
Thought makes the whole dignity of man; therefore endeavor to think well, that is the only morality.
Without Jesus Christ man must be in vice and misery with Jesus Christ man is free from vice and misery in Him is all our virtue and all our happiness. Apart from Him there is but vice, misery, darkness, death, despair.
Amusement that is excessive and followed only for its own sake, allures and deceives us.
What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.
The end point of rationality is to demonstrate the limits of rationality.
There are two kinds of people one can call reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.
The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.
Kind words produce their own image in men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.
Eloquence is a way of saying things in such a way, first, that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure, and second, that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it.
Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.
We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.
What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at his own weakness.
When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.
It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.
Good deeds, when concealed, are the most admirable.
For nature is an image of Grace, and visible miracles are images of the invisible.
Force rules the world-not opinion; but it is opinion that makes use of force.
All is one, all is different. How many natures exist in man? How many vocations? And by what chance does each man ordinarily choose what he has heard praised?
To understand is to forgive.
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