…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.

... for although people can be made worse off by all other gifts, correct reasoning alone can only be for the good.

When the origin of remote peoples goes beyond history, our languages show themselves their oldest monuments

For all bodies are in perpetual flux like rivers, and parts are passing in and out of them continually.

…every feeling is the perception of a truth...

The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it.

The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge…it would not be the source of necessary truths…

For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them.