“Please forgive the long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."(Letter 16, 1657)”

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

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

“Reverend Fathers, my letters do not customarily follow one another so closely, nor are they usually so extensive. The little time I have had has caused both. I have made this one longer only because I have not had the leisure of making it shorter.”

“Vanity is so firmly anchored in man's heart that a soldier, a camp follower, a cook or a porter will boast and expect admirers, and even philosophers want them; those who write against them want to enjoy the prestige of having written well, those who read them want the prestige of having read them, and perhaps I who write this want the same thing.”

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis.”