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Dead Smart People

When you're tired of listening to living idiots.

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The more one is enlightened and informed about the works of God, the more one will be disposed to find them excellent and entirely satisfying to all that one could have wished for.

1686

For, as we know all too well, a cubic line of desire weighs more than a cubic inch of knowledge.

1840

The death of a few more or fewer men changes neither the color of the flowers nor that of the eyes.

1926

Although a passion, for being secret, is no less a passion, [...] it matters greatly to know how to make a mystery of it.

1636

Ulrich Apt the Elder

Portrait of a Married Couple (Lorenz Kraffter and Honesta Merz?)

Portrait of a Married Couple (Lorenz Kraffter and Honesta Merz?)

1512

We must accept the situation that is made for us, which subjects us to absolute obligations towards things that are relative, limited, and imperfect.

1943

There are men who judge what is unseen by what is seen; the greatness [...] of the mind [...] by the nobility, dignities, and riches [...]. One is often measured by the other.

1674-1675

If he does not have this talent, he will not know it, even if I were to write it to him a thousand times.

c. 108 AD

If the power of instruction can substitute small qualities for great ones [...] and thus change our characters for the worse; why couldn't this same instruction change our characters for the better?

1772

Cypriot artist

Terracotta head of a youth

Terracotta head of a youth

early 3rd century BCE (?)

The rich and the poor seem to be the two most distinct parts of the State. [...] as the latter are usually in the majority and the former in the minority, they are regarded as two perfectly opposite political elements.

c. 350 BCE

Truth, in the great practical interests of life, is above all a matter of combining and reconciling extremes.

1859

Holy water [...] possesses, according to them, the most astonishing virtues; it makes sacred the places and things that were previously profane.

1766

The need that citizens have for one another places them all in a state of mutual dependence.

1776

Etruscan artist

Bronze bowl from a thymiaterion (incense burner)

Bronze bowl from a thymiaterion (incense burner)

late 4th century BCE

Life develops towards a goal, death is a return to a destination. Genesis follows genesis without end, without our knowing their origin or seeing their term.

4th century BC

Men leap from one ambition to another; they first seek to protect themselves from offense, and then to oppress their rivals.

1513-1519

No one wants to be pitied for their mistakes.

1747

Fortune, which delights in making the decision of the most important affairs depend on a single moment, showed on this occasion the weight and influence of time.

100-120 AD

Cypriot artist

Limestone Bes

Limestone Bes

late 6th–early 5th century BCE

There is nothing superfluous (except for the overly delicate).

1574

The invention of all these machines is founded on a single principle, which is that the same force that can lift a weight [...] of one hundred pounds to a height of two feet, can also lift one of two hundred pounds to a height of one foot [...].

1637

The more a Prince exhausts himself in giving, the more he impoverishes himself of friends.

1580

Sacred beings only are what they are because they are represented as such in the mind. Should we cease to believe in them, they would be as if they were not.

1912

Cypriot artist

Arrowhead

Arrowhead

ca. 480–330 BCE

If one denies the difference of the intellect among all men [...] it follows that nothing of men's souls remains after death [...] and that there is neither punishment nor reward.

1270

The soul was put into the body to do good, and it would not know evil if it did not do it.

c. 253-270 AD

Only the foolish are loud; wise women make no sensation.

1762

We can regard science as a kind of monster, since it excites the admiration, or rather the stupid astonishment of the ignorant who see it as a sort of prodigy.

1609

Cypriot artist

Standing female figurine

Standing female figurine

ca. 600–480 BCE

If one has seen clearly the symptoms of decadence, one will also understand the essence of morality—one will understand what is hidden beneath its most sacred names [...]: impoverished life, the will to perish, the great weariness. Morality is the negation of life...

1888

[...] if your sect is good, it is necessary; for if it were not absolutely necessary, you would admit to me that it would be useless [...].

1764

I feared that another, who had not employed the time, money, nor the effort, might preempt me, giving to the public things he had not seen [...].

1647

In the course of the development of large-scale industry, [working] time increasingly becomes the measure of the value of commodities, which is to say, also the measure of wages.

1849

Greek Artist

Bronze handle of a hydria (water jar)

Bronze handle of a hydria (water jar)

ca. 460–450 BCE

[...] if you practice your Christian virtues only because you want to love God and be loved by him, you are not virtuous out of love for the Good and hatred for Evil; [...] you fall into the cult of Personality: it is spiritualized egoism, but egoism nonetheless.

1841

Not only are these raindrops pure phenomena, but even their round shape and the very space in which they fall are nothing in themselves.

1781

Here and there one finds [...] souls filled with an exalted and almost fierce spiritualism, which is rarely encountered in Europe.

1835-1840

The only thing that is uncertain is whether [our] ideas truly conform to the beings of which we believe them to be images [...].

1805

Etruscan artist

Bronze handle from a cista (toiletry box)

Bronze handle from a cista (toiletry box)

4th century BCE

If the Soul does not remember its own thoughts [...] of what use is it to it to think?

1689

May he whose integrity was never in doubt not see, at sixty, his name condemned to dishonor.

81 BC

A ship that is large on a river is very small on the sea.

63-64 AD

Where is the difficulty in conceiving that the same is the case with benevolence and friendship [...], and that the primary constitution of our soul makes us desire the happiness of our fellow creatures?

1751

Roman Artist

Marble cornice fragment

Marble cornice fragment

2nd century CE

Never [...] is one tempted to raise one's tone, to lower it, to get carried away [...] because the orator is never beside himself.

1741-1784

By nature naturing, we understand a being that, by itself [...], can be known clearly and distinctly, such as God is.

c. 1660

Intellectual health [...] is manifested by a taste for action, the faculty of adapting [...], firmness joined with flexibility, [...] a spirit of simplicity that triumphs over complications, and finally, a superior common sense.

1932

I feel well, which is the sweetest thought, that I have lived my whole life in piety and justice.

4th century BC

Bartolomeo degli Erri

Saint Dominic Resuscitating Napoleone Orsini

Saint Dominic Resuscitating Napoleone Orsini

1467–74