"The priests had been told that I had dared to say that the moon was the world I came from and that their world was only a moon. They believed that constituted an adequately just pretext to condemn me to drowning, which was their way of exterminating atheists."

“Cyrano de Bergerac at Wikisource”

“After a while the press of business in the province put an end to our philosophizing, and I returned with increased determination to my plans to fly to the Moon.”

“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.”

“People were soon talking only of my bons mots, and they esteemed my wit so highly that the clergy was forced to publish a decree that forbade anyone to believe I was capable of reason, and it expressly commanded everyone of all ranks to believe — no matter how intelligently I might act — that I was guided by instinct.”

“One day, my male companion told me what had really caused him to wander about the world and finally to leave it for the Moon. He had not been able to find a single country where the imagination was free.”

“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. Suppose the universe were not infinite: God himself would be finite, because he could not be where there is nothing, and he could not increase the size of the universe without adding to his own size and come to be where he had not been before.”