The knowledge of all the opinions and judgments of other men [...] is not so much a science as a history.
1674-1675
It is weakness to give in to evils, but it is madness to foster them.
1580
The knowledge of nature gives birth to art, it gives us many means to preserve life and even provides its conveniences [...].
1697
Although it is a detestable action to employ fraud in the conduct of life, nevertheless, in the conduct of war, it becomes a laudable and glorious thing.
1513-1519
The Muse: History
ca. 1865
If you others chase me away, I will come back [...].
1737-1771
If I become aware of this loss of my faculties, and I displease myself, how could I still find pleasure in living?
4th century BC
I have always believed that the good was only the beautiful put into action, that the one was intimately linked to the other, and that they both had a common source in well-ordered nature.
1761
Let us therefore judge philosophers, not by the terms they use, but by the consistency and coherence of their principles.
45 BC
View in the Stables of the Villa of Maecenas, Tivoli
ca. 1805–10
In what would our selflessness consist if we were not of that sentiment? It would then be nothing but talk and posturing to make ourselves esteemed by the world.
1643-1662
Where will I find these connections, if not in the study of myself and the knowledge of men [...]?
1746
He never afflicted anyone otherwise than by his death.
1760
Think rather that if life flees, if youth is but a flower that soon withers, we must all the more seize the moment when we possess it [...] & not lose any particle of such a fleeting existence.
1742
Eye Miniature
1800
Let it be enough for your consolation to think that you are suffering for me and for my Father.
1263-1264
Affections are in the animal constitution what strings are on a musical instrument. [...] if the tension is too great, the instrument is badly set up, and its harmony is extinguished.
1745
It would be a pleasant thing to see a woman teaching eloquence or medicine from a professor's chair [...] leading an army; speaking before Republics or Princes as the head of an embassy.
1926
Know how to analyze syllogisms as well as Chrysippus, and what will prevent you from being miserable, from lamenting, from being jealous, [...] and from being unhappy? Nothing, certainly.
c. 108 AD
Pietà
ca. 1657–60
What the body requires is little: [...] beyond that, it is for the whims of vice, not for need, that we toil.
42-43 AD
The mystery of the resurrection [...].
1841
The love of independence was to be succeeded by fear and perhaps disgust for free institutions; after such an abuse of liberty, such a reversal was inevitable.
1893
The fortunate [...] feel adversity much more keenly than those who have already experienced it.
1636
Mirope Savati Gaye
1865
By substituting the word Priests for that of God, Theology becomes the simplest of sciences. [...] there are no true Atheists, since, unless one is an imbecile, one cannot deny the existence of the Clergy.
1768
I discover at the same time that this body has extension, and that my movement consists in traversing it; these two ideas are [...] absolutely correlative, and cannot exist one without the other.
1817
Almost everyone receives their ideas ready-made and follows public opinion their whole life. [...] Servile imitators, who say yes or no according to how they've been prompted, and then believe they have decided for themselves.
4th century BC
[...] the degree which combination has reached in a country clearly marks the rank it occupies in the hierarchy of the world market.
1847
Head of a comic figurine
late 4th–3rd century BCE
Among these [meteorological] phenomena, some are inexplicable to us; others are accessible to us to a certain extent.
c. 334 BC
In what sense do you take faith in miracles and ignorance to be synonymous and equivalent?
1661-1676
We have tried to rebuild it, without claiming to explain it absolutely.
c. 1552-1553
I am not so accustomed to the favors of fortune as to expect anything extraordinary from it; it is enough for me when it does not send me [...] accidents that would give cause for sadness to the greatest philosopher in the world.
1643-1649
The Forest at Pontaubert
1881
Evil, being but a corruption of the good, could only act or work upon a good foundation; [...] only good things are capable of being corrupted.
c. 253-270 AD
The less we permit deviation in voice and gesture, the more finesse we demand in the performance.
1746
There is a right that allows us to take a man's life, but there is none that allows us to take his death from him: that is pure cruelty.
1878
If there exists a courageous mortal who has a true desire, not to remain nailed to the discoveries already made [...], but to add to these inventions himself [...], let him deign to join us.
1620
Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)
1887–88
The social subordination of women stands out as an isolated fact in the midst of modern social institutions; it is the only relic of an old intellectual and moral world destroyed everywhere else [...].
1869
[Self-love] resembles the instrument for the perpetuity of the species.
1764
This intellectual freedom is abolished [...] when the intermediary of motives, the understanding, is disturbed permanently or only temporarily.
1839
It is these results of our practice that we would like to present here in their entirety and submit for discussion.
1895
The Love Song
1868–77
Chance is therefore mechanism behaving as if it had an intention.
1932
It is great negligence or extreme malice to discourse on moral things in a vague and obscure manner.
1689
Where all other things are equal, virtue alone gives superiority.
100-120 AD
No imaginary perfection can pull me upward, not even by a millimeter. For an imaginary perfection is automatically at the level of myself who imagines it...
1947
Edward Smith Stanley (1752–1834), Twelfth Earl of Derby, Elizabeth, Countess of Derby (Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, 1753–1797), and Their Son (Edward Smith Stanley, 1775–1851)
ca. 1776