“We feel and experience ourselves to be eternal.”

Self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

Reason connot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.

Nothing in nature is by chance. Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

There can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.

He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.

Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

To know all things in the Word is thus to know all the suffering of the world transfigured by the resurrection, somehow reconciled and atoned in eternal life.

If I had a religion, its deity would be Audysseus, the sound God, and He would be a vengeful god, dishing out eternal damnation to people with cheap stage monitors.

Anything physical is always changing, therefore, its reality is not constant, not eternal.

The being is altered, the fortune is varied, only the elements remaining what they are in substance, that same principle persevering which was always the one material principle, which is the true substance of things, eternal, ingenerable and incorruptible.

Of the eternal corporeal substance (which is not producible ex nihilo, nor reducible ad nihilum, but rarefiable, condensable, formable, arrangeable, and “fashionable”) the composition is dissolved, the complexion is changed, the figure is modified.

So we find messages of self-salvation extremely attractive, whether they are religious (Keep these rules and you earn eternal blessing) or secular (Grab hold of these things and you’ll experience blessing now).

While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend.

I feel it racing through me, eating away at the weight. There is nothing that can kill me now; I am powerful and invincible and eternal.