[While] there are worldly singularities, there are Christian and salutary ones, too; and this singularity by which one is differentiated from the crowd who tread the broad path is what constitutes the straight and narrow path of the Gospels.... Holy things will never be established or reestablished so long as we have this fear of appearing singular.

Pensées, p. 90, as translated by Mary Ilford in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1968), p. 163