What a great advantage to be of noble birth, since it gives a man of eighteen the standing, recognition and respect that another man might not earn b… - Blaise Pascal

La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la première. (The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.)

For it is beyond doubt that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those, who, being so removed from this source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transmission does not only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. For what is more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a share, that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence? Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.

The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play