So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we … - Blaise Pascal

Reverend Fathers, my letters do not customarily follow one another so closely, nor are they usually so extensive. The little time I have had has caused both. I have made this one longer only because I have not had the leisure of making it shorter.

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after — as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day — the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there, now rather than then.

But there are some who can only admire worldly greatness, as though there were no intellectual greatness; and others who only admire intellectual greatness, as though there were not infinitely higher things in wisdom.