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If you believe in God you are at no disadvantage in this life, and at considerable advantage in the next. If you do not believe, but find in the next that there was a next, you are most unfortunate!
One-half of the ills of life come because men are unwilling to sit down quietly for thirty minutes to think through all the possible consequences of their acts.
It is not certain that everything is uncertain.
I have spent much time in the study of the abstract sciences; but the paucity of persons with whom you can communicate on such subjects disgusted me with them. When I began to study man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to him, and that in diving into them, I wandered farther from my real object than those who knew them not, and I forgave them for not having attended to these things. I expected then, however, that I should find some companions in the study of man, since it was so specifically a duty. I was in error. There are fewer students of man than of geometry.
The war existing between the senses and reason.
The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.
We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.
We know that there is an infinite, and we know not its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is a numerical infinity. But we know not of what kind; it is untrue that it is even, untrue that it is odd; for the addition of a unit does not change its nature; yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this certainly holds of every finite number). Thus we may quite well know that there is a God without knowing what He is.
The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.
We must kill them in war, just because they live beyond the river. If they lived on this side, we would be called murderers.
Those are weaklings who know the truth and uphold it as long as it suits their purpose, and then abandon it.
Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first.
Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.
Law, without force, is impotent.
The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.
It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.
Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.
What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.
The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole.
We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.
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