Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But even if the universe crushed him, man would still be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of.

All our dignity, then, consists in thought. It is from there that we must be raised up, and not from space and duration, which we could never fill. Let us labor, therefore, to think well: this is the principle of morality.

Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily, whoever wants to act the angel acts the beast.

The condition of man: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. What then do we seek? What do we do? What do we presume? The feeling of the falseness of present pleasures, the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, which are unknown: imperceptible to grasp.

All of humanity's misfortune comes from one single thing, which is not knowing how to remain at rest in a room. Men, unable to cure death, misery, ignorance, have decided, in order to make themselves happy, not to think of them at all. So they plunge into diversion, into the hunt, into business, into war, not to mention the particular passions and miseries of each person.

Hence it comes that men love so much noise and tumult; hence it comes that prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is incomprehensible. And it is finally the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings that they are continually diverted, and provided with every kind of pleasure.

A king without diversion is a man full of miseries. And so great care is taken to divert him with those pleasures, with those amusements around him, and he is happy in this, that around him stand people whose whole care is to let nothing unpleasant escape their notice, and to procure him diversions. The great one in question is the king, the first of the seven.

What then does this craving and this helplessness cry out to us, if not that there was once in man a true happiness, of which there now remains to him only the mark and the completely empty trace, which he tries in vain to fill with everything that surrounds him, seeking from absent things what he cannot obtain from things present, but unable to enjoy them, since this happiness being neither within our reach nor in present man, but absent and past?

Thus we see man, instead of remaining at rest in his own nature, escaping out of himself, and ceaselessly seeking outside a good he does not possess. All these misfortunes, in truth, arise from there being in us a principle of infinite disorder which ceaselessly carries us beyond the present.

It is a deplorable thing to contemplate the state of man. Nothing can console him when he thinks of himself, unless he be stunned, dazzled, his thought diverted to other subjects. And this is why games, the company of women, war, high position suffice. How many are there who have nothing of their own, and think only of the loss of their goods, of dangers, of death, or who look at nothing else? This is the source of all vices: lust, envy, cruelty, sadness, impiety, despair.

These very miseries prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a great lord, the miseries of a dispossessed king. The greatness of man is so visible that it can be drawn even from his misery. For what is natural in animals we call misery when it happens to man. And so his greatness lies even in his knowledge of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable.

To be incurably miserable is, then, to be miserable; but to be miserable and to know that one is so is to be great. Man's greatness is so evident that it may be drawn from his very misery itself.

Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, feeble nature; learn from man that man infinitely surpasses man, and let him judge your sciences, when he makes you understand that you have nothing of your greatness and nothing of your misery that is not known to him.

It is the heart which feels God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God felt by the heart, not by reason. If you do not know him as such, there are only weak proofs. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. Finitude, nothingness, misery are so natural to man, that nothing is needed to be miserable but not to be God.