If you have learned [the principles], you can be ready for any name you are asked.
c. 108 AD
Money torments its possessors more than its aspirants.
63-64 AD
Aristocratic nations are naturally inclined to restrict the limits of human perfectibility too much, and democratic nations sometimes extend them beyond measure.
1835-1840
Did you not know long ago that at the very moment of my birth, nature had pronounced my death sentence?
4th century BC
Steamboats in the Port of Rouen
1896
What becomes of morality when the leading citizens [...] know only the need for money, when any means of making it is accepted among them, and none brings dishonor?
1776
[God] sent this Koran to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, as kings signify their orders through the great officers of the crown.
1764
The reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.
1580
The body and its actions [...] cannot bring any modification to the soul, except to present themselves to it as objects.
c. 1660
Limestone statuette of a female votary
3900 BCE - 100 CE
It is truly astonishing [...] that one can still think of reducing the principle of duty to the doctrine of happiness.
1797-1798
There is no indifferent step in life; if we lead it without the knowledge of truth, what an abyss!
1746
How can I, the slave, get on this bus, use it for my 12 sous just like anyone else? What an extraordinary favor!
1934-1942
[Theurgy] employed by a pontiff in the coronation of kings contributes to making the leaders of nations more respectable in the eyes of the people, and imprints upon them an entirely divine character.
1766
The Seine: Morning
1874
That which resists is a real being. For to resist is to be resistant, it is to be, it is to exist.
1817
To carry one's mind back into the past, and make it, so to speak, ancient [...] is an immense and delicate work.
1623
As for the pain, I do not take it into account at all; for it is so short.
1643-1649
Envy separates, charity unites; have charity, and you will possess everything with it.
1263-1264
The Bacino, Venice, with the Dogana and a Distant View of the Isola di San Giorgio
ca. 1709
A bad example is the most pernicious doctrine [...] for the indiscreet populace, who thinks that whatever evil is done and suffered is permissible.
c. 1552-1553
Extraordinary actions can only come from a heart that is also extraordinary.
1636
Science retains and should retain from motion only its visual aspect.
1922
[He who refuses the truth] is the ill-bred child; he bites into the poisoned fruit and beats the mother who snatches it from him.
1772
Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels
ca. 1350
...a form of punctuation [...] that is too contrary to our modern habits.
1643-1662
Even where society rests most completely on the division of labor, it does not dissolve into a dust of juxtaposed atoms [...].
1893
A child who has never left the paternal home imagines that the feelings and manners of his parents are universal reason.
1674-1675
If literary history were written with the memories and judgments of contemporaries about one another, how little it would resemble the one that posterity more or less settles upon!
1926
Portrait of a Dwarf
1525
He vanquished the most cunning by his shrewdness, and the most valiant by his audacity.
100-120 AD
Great men, like great epochs, are explosive materials in which a tremendous force is accumulated.
1888
An objection can be made in two ways: either by considering the time, or by considering the facts.
329-323 BC
'The poet is the conscious voice of what is unconscious in us.'
1896
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
1530
To truly know the nature of the people, one must be a prince; and to truly know the nature of princes, one must be of the people.
1855
This more or less keen need that all mediocre men have to console themselves for their nullity, by depreciating the greatest geniuses, and by curiously seeking out their faults [...].
1760
Taking the term in its strict sense, a true democracy has never existed, and never will. It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed.
1762
And the world, for each individual, is the portion of the world with which he is in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society.
1859
Head of a comic figurine
late 4th–3rd century BCE
Matter is neither born nor dies: all birth and all death are in it. [...] It unites the inconstant flight of time and the rigorous immobility of space.
1819
Each one must bear the penalty for his own crime, and a man should not be made odious or suspect for the fault another has committed.
1686
One has no right to blame this world, to say that it is not beautiful, that it is not the best possible of corporeal worlds, nor to accuse the cause from which it holds its existence.
c. 253-270 AD
Many popular religions, judging by the conceptions of common men, are truly a kind of demonism.
1757
Self-Portrait of an Unidentified Artist
1785
In the past, the ancients served in times of order, and withdrew in times of disorder. [...] It is better to withdraw to remain pure, than to be soiled by contact with usurpers.
4th century BC
Machines were [...] the weapon employed by the capitalists to put down specialized labor in revolt.
1847
It is maintained that space is only the order of coexisting things; yet it is admitted that the material world may be finite; from which it necessarily follows that there must be an empty space beyond the world.
1715-1716
True life [...] begins for those who escape from the bonds of the body where they were captive; but what you call life is really death.
54-51 BC
Limestone statuette of a male votary with Cypriot shorts and a diadem
first half of the 6th century BCE