The only habit a child should be allowed to form is to contract none [...].
1762
If one likes to imagine a man flying in the air [...], it does not follow from this alone that the man can indeed fly. Thus, thoughts [...] are not realities.
c. 350 B.C.E.
Man, without wanting to, without knowing it, creates God in his human image: later this created God creates, wanting to, knowing it, the universe and man.
1841
This movement [...] follows as necessarily from the disposition of the organs alone [...] as does that of a clock from the force, situation, and shape of its counterweights and wheels.
1637
La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, 1851–1930)
1889
Little by little, the people grow accustomed to irreverence towards the magistrate, [...] learn to disobey willingly, and let themselves be led by the bait of liberty, or rather license, which is the sweetest and most tantalizing poison in the world.
c. 1552-1553
The predicaments belong to the first operation of the intellect, in which there is no composition by being, nor any division by non-being.
c. 1270
Wherever the law, without force, cannot protect the weak from the powerful, opulence can be seen as a means of escaping injustice [...].
1772
When one is wicked enough to commit a dark deed, one should not have the cowardice to deny it.
1765-1769
Spoon or ligula
670 BCE - 330 CE
The unity and simplicity of this concept would easily make one forget what a long series of obstacles had to be overcome to achieve it.
1663
[Some] perish for having preferred what they should have feared to what could not harm them.
c. 108 AD
...when one had bought it, one still had to give money to prevent it from being sold to others.
1776
Two empires are in relation to one another as two individuals in the state of nature.
1677
The Assumption of the Virgin
ca. 1337–39
There is a word without words... Sometimes there is no need for words...
4th century BC
Forgetting the past, banishing the worries of the future, let us enjoy the present; in each moment of our existence, let us seize this good, over which fate and fortune cannot exercise their whims.
1742
One does not refute Christianity; one does not refute a disease of the eyes.
1888
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism [...] is that the thing, reality, [...] is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as concrete human activity, not as practice.
1841
Buckle
7000 BCE - 330 CE
Needs are arranged in pairs of opposites, and must be combined in a balance. Man needs food, but also an interval between meals; he needs warmth and coolness, rest and exercise.
1943
Democracy there is less a regular form of government than a weapon that has been habitually used to destroy [...] the old society.
1864-1866
The present time is always [...] the disciple of the preceding time, and [...] we are moved today by the habits [...] acquired under the old social order.
1797-1798
[...] the harsher a law is, the less it is applied.
1926
Fantastic Landscape
ca. 1765
Who does not see, in these sublime counsels, the language of enthusiasm, of hyperbole? Are these marvelous counsels not made to discourage man, and to cast him into despair?
1766
[The victor] rendered liberty to all nations and to all cities.
100-120 AD
If understanding in general is defined as the faculty of conceiving rules, judgment will be the faculty of subsuming under rules, that is, of deciding whether something falls under a given rule or not.
1781
In a civil dissension, [...] votes should be weighed, not counted.
54-51 BC
Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834)
1785
Financial embarrassment = bankruptcy.
1830-1831
Hatred and envy depart with life, and it is especially among the dead that they cease.
c. 387 BC
Humanity has never done without religion. It is therefore likely that [...] religion was the raison d'être of the fabulatory function.
1932
What a pity, what a poverty of thought, to have said that beasts are machines, deprived of knowledge and feeling!
1764
Bronze axe head
ca. 2500–1900 BCE
The more defined beliefs and practices are, the less room they leave for individual differences.
1893
Others, on the contrary, go running after the most minute details, which have no influence on the substance of actions.
1623
The more necessary vice is, the more it is vice; nothing in the world is more vicious than that which, by its nature, is incapable of being good.
1746
Above all these gods reigns the God par excellence, the absolute Good, principle of all that is divine, source of the divinity of the other gods.
c. 253-270 AD
Bronze jug
late 1st–2nd century CE
One should never give full consent except to propositions that appear so evidently true that one cannot refuse it to them without feeling an inner pain and secret reproaches from reason.
1674-1675
To cure the ills of the people, a few words suffice; the sword must be used to root out those of princes.
1855
Adversity only breaks the souls that prosperity has deceived.
42-43 AD
A beautiful retreat in war brings as much honor as a proud attack.
1636
Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine
1851
All this amounts to saying that all bodies whose parts are only mechanically united are not substances, but only machines or aggregates of several substances.
1686
The 'power of the people over themselves' does not express the true state of the case; [...] self-government [...] is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest.
1859
The essential role of [the soul] is to master our passions.
1580
Men, [...] being all naturally free, equal, and independent, no one can be removed from this state and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.
1690
Bronze tweezers
1st–2nd century CE