33 quotes
You are now bearing the punishment for the shortcomings of your world. Here, as in your world, there are benighted people who cannot tolerate thinking about things they are not accustomed to.
The Other World (1657)
Do you say it is incomprehensible that there is nothingness in the world and that we are partly composed of nothing?
The Other World (1657)
Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see.
The Other World (1657)
I will prove that there are infinite worlds in an infinite world.
The Other World (1657)
Even if a king defeats his enemy in battle, that still doesn't settle anything. There are other, less numerous armies of philosophers and scientists, and their contests determine the true triumph or defeat of nations.
The Other World (1657)
A present loses its value when it is given without the choice of the person who receives it.
The Other World (1657)
I learned to understand their language and to speak it a little.
The Other World (1657)
And maybe... someone on the Moon is even now making fun of someone else who says that our globe is a world.
As God has made the soul immortal, he has made the universe infinite, if it is true that eternity is nothing other than unlimited duration and infinity is space without limits.
The Other World (1657)
How do you think a spade, sword or dagger wounds us? Because the metal is a form of matter in which the particles are closer and more tightly bound together than those of your flesh.
The Other World (1657)
This movement of matter, then, could not fail to produce something, and whatever it is will always be admired by the unthinking person who does not realize how close it came to not being made.
The Other World (1657)
To believe something, one must imagine that it is more probable than not. Unless you show him what is probable or he realizes it himself, he may tell you that he believes and yet he will not believe.
The Other World (1657)
It was indeed a book, but it was a miraculous one … It was a book to be read not with eyes but with ears.
Give thought to life and liberty.
The Other World (1657)
You praise a man for having killed his enemy by means of an advantage; and by praising him for boldness you praise him for a sin against nature, because boldness leads to destruction.
The Other World (1657)
Insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun... had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages.
I established myself in a fairly remote country house and entertained my imagination with various means of transport. Here is how I betook myself to heaven.
The Other World (1657)
All that has sensation and growth — all matter, in short — will pass through man. When that has happened, the great Day of Judgment will come, and that is the end point of the mysteries in the philosophy of the prophets.
The Other World (1657)
For all eternity has God not occupied His intellect with the cabbage's birth as well as yours? … Will anyone say that we are born in the image of the Sovereign Being, while cabbages are not?
Even though they, themselves, were material beings, they could show themselves to us only by taking on bodies that our senses were able to perceive.
The Other World (1657)