My Blog

Tag: world

  • Counterfeit of piety

    “I know of no quality so easy to counterfeit as piety, if conduct and life are not made to conform with it.” III.2 “Of repentance” (p.748)

  • All the abuses in the world

    “[A]ll the abuses in the world are engendered, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance and our being bound to accept everything that we cannot refute.” III.2 Of cripples (p. 959)

  • Better pleased with other’s things

    “Among human characteristics, this one is rather common: to be better pleased with other people’s things than with our own, and to love movement and change.” III.9 “Of vanity” (p. 878)

  • On the world and its movement

    “The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion— the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt— both with the common motion and with their own.” III.2 “Of repentance” (p.740)

  • “Let us follow along, in God’s name”

    “Let us follow along, in God’s name, let us follow!”   II.37 “Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers” (p. 706)

  • No good thing is exempt from some mixture of pain and discomfort

    “The weakness of our condition makes it impossible for things to come into our experience in their natural simplicity and purity […] Of the pleasures and good things that we have, there is not one exempt from some mixture of pain and discomfort.” II. 20 “We taste nothing pure” (p. 619)

  • What we call monsters

    “What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it…From his infinite wisdom there proceeds nothing but that is good and ordinary and regular…We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according…

  • We are nothing but ceremony

    “We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.”   II.17 “Of presumption” (581).

  • Born in a very depraved time

    “Misfortune has its uses. It is good to be born in a very depraved time, for by comparison with others, you are considered virtuous for a cheap price. Anyone who is only a parricide and sacrilegious in our days is a good and honorable man.” II.17 “Of presumption” (pp. 595)

  • Seek not the world

    “Seek no longer that the world should speak of you, but how you should speak to yourself.” I.39 “Of solitude” (p. 221)