Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may makes advances in morality, but all mankind together are making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older; so that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man, who never ceases to live and learn.
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.
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
One must know oneself, if this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.