As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.
Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.
If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.
All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.
It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.
The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.
Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.
There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.
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 present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.
Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.
To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.
It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.
Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.
Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.