I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Your beginning," he said to me, "is the rule of what will be required of you: seek to behave so as to do more afterwards, but watch out never to do less."

Everything on earth is in continuous flux: nothing preserves a constant fixed form, and our affections towards external things pass and change with them... There is nothing solid to which the heart can attach itself. Also, there is scarcely a pleasure here below which does not pass; as for enduring happiness, I doubt that it can be known. In our most vivid joys there is scarcely an instant at which our hearts could truly say: would that this moment might last forever; and how can one call that transient state happy which still leaves our hearts disturbed and empty, which makes us regret something beforehand or still desire something afterwards.

The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man.