Nicolas Malebranche Quotations

We are made to know and love God.

God transforms, so to speak, this air into words, into various sounds. He makes you understand these various sounds through the modifications by which you are affected.

As our bodies live upon the earth and find sustenance in the fruits which it produces, so our minds feed on the same truths as the intelligible and immutable substance of the divine Word contains.

Our soul is not united to our body in the ordinary sense of these terms. It is immediately and directly united to God alone.

We see things in this material world, wherein our bodies dwell, only because our mind through its attention lives in another world, only because it contemplates the beauties of the archetypal and intelligible world which Reason contains.

He has willed - He wills incessantly - that the modifications of the mind and those of the body shall be reciprocal. This is the conjunction and the natural dependence of the two parts of which we are constituted.

Do not fear lest you should meditate too much upon Him and speak of Him in an unworthy way, providing you are led by faith. Do not fear lest you should entertain false opinions of Him so long as they are in conformity with the notion of the infinitely perfect Being.

You will not dishonor the divine perfections by judgments unworthy of them, provided you never judge of Him by yourself, provided you do not ascribe to the Creator the imperfections and limitations of created beings.

Prejudices are not easily got rid of as an old coat which is no longer thought of.

I love good and pleasure, I hate evil and pain, I want to be happy and I am not mistaken in believing, that people, angels and even demons have those same inclinations.

You find yourself in the world, without any power, immovable as a rock, stupid, so to speak, as a log of wood.

In this connection, faith and experience teach us many truths by means of the short-cut of authority and by the proofs of very pleasant and agreeable feelings.

I beg of you always to dwell upon the necessity of a thorough understanding of principles, in order to stop the vivacity of his mind, and please do not forget to meditate upon the subject of our discussion.

All creatures are united to God alone in an immediate union. They depend essentially and directly upon Him. Being all alike equally impotent, they cannot be in reciprocal dependence upon one another.

God joins us together by means of the body, in consequence of the laws of the communication of movements. He affects us with the same feelings in consequence of the laws of the conjunction of body and soul.

You cannot of yourself move your arm or alter your position, situation, posture, do to other men good or evil, or effect the least change in the world.

God has linked together all His works, though He has not on that account produced in them entities charged with the function of union.

I derive nothing whatever from my own nature, nothing from the nature imagined by the philosophers - all comes from God and His decrees.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to create.

One should assiduously pursue perfection without ever claiming to attain it.

I do not believe there is anything useful which men can know with exactitude that they cannot know by arithmetic and algebra.

Imagination is the mad boarder.

We can always make ourselves liked provided we act likable, but we cannot always make ourselves esteemed, no matter what our merits are.

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

I am not my own light unto myself.

When I touch a human hand, I touch heaven.

We are rational creatures: Our virtue and perfection is to love reason, or rather to love order.

Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the Soul,