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The divine is perhaps that quality in man which permits him to endure the lack of God.

It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.

Above all, remember that God looks for solid virtues in us, such as patience, humility, obedience, abnegation of your own will - that is, the good will to serve Him and our neighbor in Him. His providence allows us other devotions only insofar as He sees that they are useful to us.

When God calls a man to be upright and pure and generous, he also calls him to be intelligent and skillful, and strong and brave.

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Theology in general seems to me a substitution of human ingenuity for divine wisdom.

Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.