“Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them.”

“Unless we know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, concupiscence, weakness, wretchedness and unrighteousness, we are truly blind. And if someone knows all this and does not desire to be saved, what can be said of him?”

“Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.”

“We are full of things which take us out of ourselves. Our instinct makes us feel that we must seek our happiness outside ourselves. Our passions impel us outside, even when no objects present themselves to excite them. External objects tempt us of themselves, and call to us, even when we are not thinking of them. And thus philosophers have said in vain, " Retire within yourselves, you will find your good there." We do not believe them, and those who believe them are the most empty and the most foolish.”

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

“Pride counterbalances all these miseries; man either hides or displays them, and glories in his awareness of them.”

“Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.”