Status Updates From New Essays on Human Underst...

"we have immeasurably more reason to congratulate ourselves than to complain of our lot, since for most of our hardships we have only ourselves to blame. It would be especially wrong to complain of the deficiencies in our knowledge, when we make so little use of the knowledge which kindly nature does give to us" (388)

“Nature the Architect did very well, it seems to me , making men so sensitive to things which have so little effect on the senses. If we were incapable of becoming ambitious or miserly, it would be hard for us [..] to become virtuous and rational enough to work towards our own perfection in the face of the present pleasures which distract us from it” (205)

Matter without unique qualities but continua of the same qualities" ... all bodies have a degree of cohesion; just as I think that there are none which are entirely without fluidity or possessed of a cohesion which cannot be overcome; so that in my view the atoms of Epicurus, which are supposed to be unconquerably hard, cannot exist, any more than can the rarefied and perfectly fluid matter of the Cartesians (125)"