“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.", 1657)”

“I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.”

“To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize.”

“When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowin...”

“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.”

“Men are not gentle and graceful beings solely oriented towards good. They are physical, coarse, contradictory, stretched between desires and temptations. In an unnatural wish to make them sinless a...”

“Lie down beside these watersThat bubble from the spring;Hear in the desert silenceThe desert sparrow sing;Draw from the shapeless momentSuch pattern as you can;And cleave henceforth to Beauty;Expec...”

“The motives of mankind are plainer than the motions they produce.”