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Dead Smart People

When you're tired of listening to living idiots.

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The prophets did not always speak by revelation, and this even happened very rarely [...].

1670

A life woven from pleasures [...] is infinitely more subject to disgust than a laborious life.

1742

He preferred the care of his life to the care of the empire. How much more would he have preferred the care of his life to lesser cares?

4th century BC

Evil has a head start in us; we walk towards virtue, entangled in a thousand vices; I am ashamed to say it: we cultivate honesty in our spare moments.

63-64 AD

Cypriot artist

Terracotta head of a youth

Terracotta head of a youth

2nd century BCE (?)

I would not wish to put wisdom at such a high price.

1580

[...] by a habitual blindness, men do not see what exists; they see what their inclination represents to them.

1764

As soon as we approach a new domain, the previous principles are of no more help to us; fundamental laws of another kind appear [...].

1819

April, the perfume of the gods, who, from the heavens, smell the scent of the plain.

1546/1563

Cypriot artist

Terracotta head of a youth

Terracotta head of a youth

early 3rd century BCE (?)

Organized bodies [...] remain the same only in appearance, and not, strictly speaking. It is much like a river that is always changing its water, or like the ship of Theseus that the Athenians were always repairing.

1704

great princes are above the law.

circa 1748

Memory [...] precisely represents the point of intersection between spirit and matter.

1896

What does a superior mind matter, if the heart does not match it?

1636

baron François Gérard

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord (1754–1838), Prince de Bénévent

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord (1754–1838), Prince de Bénévent

1808

All sensitive organisms know those states where one suffers and delights in one's suffering; but one only delights in it because one foresees its end.

1926

[...] the poor and the rich equally unhappy with their station, and consequently equally unjust and blind, for they envy one another, and believe each other to be happy.

1746

It is not enough for you to bear my death with patience; if you do not die yourselves, you have no fruit to hope for from my death.

1263-1264

The ultimate sanction of all morality (external motives apart) is a subjective feeling in our own minds.

1861

Cypriot artist

Terracotta plank-shaped figurine

Terracotta plank-shaped figurine

ca. 2000–1800 BCE

The German spirit is an indigestion; it can never be done with anything.

1888

He leaves the second volume [...] advanced enough to be published.

March 17, 1883

The sanctity of this learned man dazzled me as much as the beauty of his divine style. [...] he touched my heart, and I find myself more virtuous for it.

45 BC

The word is also an image, an eminently abstract image; indeed, by pronouncing the name of a thing, one imagines one knows the thing itself.

1841

Carlo Crivelli

Madonna and Child

Madonna and Child

ca. 1480

If they remain savages, they are pushed before you [...]; if they want to become civilized, contact with men more civilized than themselves delivers them to oppression and misery. [...] they perish.

1835-1840

It is [...] difficult to think that I cannot succeed, if my affair is conducted with some skill.

1513-1527

It is true that the debts were extinguished: but the taxes remained; and they were accumulated [...].

1776

It was the combined passions of the love of liberty and the hatred of slavery which, more than the skill of engineers, made for the famous and stubborn defenses.

1758

Georges Seurat

A Man Leaning on a Parapet

A Man Leaning on a Parapet

ca. 1881

Whoever holds in his hand what you desire or what you fear, is your master.

c. 108 AD

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

c. 375 BC

It takes but a word, a gesture from them [princes] [...] to make science [...] pass for low pedantry; recklessness [...] for greatness of courage; and impiety [...] for strength and freedom of mind.

1674-1675

[Error] is any way of thinking in matters of Religion that differs from that of the Priests [...]. There is no more unpardonable crime among Christians than to be mistaken.

1768

Unknown Artist

Ornament, flower-shaped mount for stone base

Ornament, flower-shaped mount for stone base

7000 BCE - 330 CE

Each man is ordinarily such as he pleases to be, according to the inclinations to which he abandons himself and the nature of his soul.

c. 253-270 AD

I would rather die than accuse my mother.

1764

Repentance [...] serves to make us correct ourselves, not only for faults committed voluntarily, but also for those made through ignorance.

1643-1649

Imagining that, to penetrate the secrets of nature, it was enough to meditate with obstinacy, to turn one's mind, so to speak, in every direction, and to keep it in perpetual agitation.

1620

Greek Artist, Cypriot

Arrowhead

Arrowhead

ca. 480–330 BCE

It was neither their discord nor their enmity, but their friendship and union, that was for [the republic] the first and most fatal misfortune.

100-120 AD

Wisdom consists in knowing as much as one can about these divine, eternal, primitive, immutable phenomena; and philosophy is but the assiduous pursuit of this noble study.

c. 350 B.C.E.

Every movement performed is always exactly represented by the quantity of extension traversed, for it is the same fact considered in two ways.

1817

Probability is the likeliness of a thing to be true. [...] The way the Mind receives such propositions is what we call belief, assent, or opinion.

1689

Nicolas Froment

The Pérussis Altarpiece

The Pérussis Altarpiece

1480

One should not write for such readers when one wants to live beyond one's own century.

1750

The great sociologists [...] have hardly moved beyond generalities about the nature of societies, the relationship between the social and biological realms, and the general course of progress.

1895

Let us revisit our masters up close; let us restore their true words [...]. An excellent regimen that I propose, even to original authors, to reinvigorate themselves for a season.

1670

Only effort without desire [...] unfailingly contains a reward.

1947

Peter Paul Rubens

Saint Teresa of Avila Interceding for Souls in Purgatory

Saint Teresa of Avila Interceding for Souls in Purgatory

1597