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folly.
For this is how men reason, when they choose to live in such ignorance of
what they are and without seeking enlightenment. "I know not," they say...
196. Men lack heart; they would not make a friend of it.
197. To be insensible to the extent of despising interesting things, and to
become insensible to the point which interests us most.
198. The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great
things, indicates a strange inversion.
199. Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death,
where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who
remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn,
looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the
condition of men.
200. A man in a dungeon, ignorant whether his sentence be pronounced and
having only one hour to learn it, but this hour enough, if he knew that it
is pronounced, to obtain its repeal, would act unnaturally in spending that
hour, not in ascertaining his sentence, but in playing piquet. So it is
against nature that man, etc. It is making heavy the hand of God.
Thus not only the zeal of those who seek Him proves God, but also the
blindness of those who seek Him not.
201. All the objections of this one and that one only go against themselves,
and not against religion. All that infidels say ...
202. From those who are in despair at being without faith, we see that God
does not enlighten them; but as to the rest, we see there is a God who makes
them blind.
203. Fascinatio nugacitatis.[26] --That passion may not harm us, let us act
as if we had only eight hours to live.
204. If we ought to devote eight hours of life, we ought to devote a hundr
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