“The infinitely small have a pride infinitely great.”

“It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”

“What is the verdict of the vastest mind?Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.Man is a stranger to his own research;He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,Our being mingles with the infinite;Ourselves we never see, or come to know.”

“I am ignorant of how I was formed and how I was born. Through a quarter of my lifetime I was absolutely ignorant of the reasons for everything I saw and heard and felt, and was merely a parrot prompted by other parrots... When I sought to advance along that infinite course, I could neither find one single footpath or fully discover one single object, and from the upward leap I made to contemplate eternity I fell back into the abyss of my ignorance.”

“All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.”

“I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want.”

“Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.”