Through his abdication, Charles V in turn rose above fortune.
1636
By the way you eat, be useful to those who eat with you; by the way you drink, to those who drink: yield to them; practice self-denial; endure everything from them.
c. 108 AD
It is not possible [...] that evil be destroyed, for there must always be something contrary to the good; it is therefore a necessity that it circulates on this earth and around our mortal nature.
c. 253-270 AD
In times of trouble, the inhabitants of Paris were obliged, during the night, to place lit lanterns on their windows.
1662
Sunflowers
1887
You think misfortune crushes him? Misfortune serves him.
63-64 AD
Neither intelligence nor pleasure can be the good, if they are lacking something.
c. 360 BC
A man [...] cannot, by any compact, bind his children or his posterity. For a son, when he is of age, being as free as his father ever was, no act of the father can [...] take away the son's liberty.
1690
The multitude believes more in persons than in things, and [...] is more persuaded by the authority of the speaker than by the reasons he gives.
c. 1552-1553
Italian Landscape
ca. 1825–28
To believe that the existence of the world is explained by a creator is a psychological illusion.
1841
The value of the form can only be the value of the labor that provides it. It is the wage due to the worker.
1776
Those who have power [...] have the right to punish only on the condition that Christ truly dwells in their soul [...].
1962
We enjoy only people; the rest is nothing.
1746
Terracotta antefix (roof tile) with head of a satyr
4th century BCE
The meditation of divine things should have made [a man] gentle and charitable; yet what comes from him often seems proud, fierce, and full of harshness.
1686
A person who might have an infinity of real causes for displeasure, but who would strive [...] to turn their imagination away from them, never thinking of them, except when the necessity of affairs would oblige it...
1643-1649
All prejudices come from the intestines.
1888
The mode of imprisonment and the duration of imprisonment are two correlative ideas that cannot be separated. [...] To modify the regime without touching the duration is to wish for the penal law to be either cruel or powerless.
1864-1866
Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541–1609)
ca. 1600
It is necessary that contraries be in the same genus, if there is no contrary to the genus.
End of the 4th century BC
[...] the paths through which the spirits flow are smoother and more united by the habit of practice[...]
1674-1675
The more often we have had any given perception, the more easily we recall its memory; but also the less this memory strikes and moves us.
1801
[Their] tumultuous and incoherent beginnings are reminiscent of Flaubert's silent youth. [...] his first work was a masterpiece.
1926
The Burial of Christ
1595
He gave himself over to debauchery [...] whether to escape the sad reflections that assailed him when he was sober [...].
100-120 AD
Old fool [...] who eats without ploughing and dresses without spinning. You who claim that merely opening your lips [...] is enough to establish the distinction between good and evil.
4th century BC
It is the enjoying, not the possessing, that makes us happy.
1580
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
Horse and rider
ca. 750–600 BCE
All these opinions are absolutely foreign to morality; one must be a good person [...] virtue is of all eternity.
1764
Any condensation of the social mass, especially if it is accompanied by an increase in population, necessarily determines the progress of the division of labor.
1893
The understanding [...] is the medium of motives, that is, the intermediary through which they act on the will, which is, properly speaking, the very core of man.
1839
The value and use of each part depends on the relation [...] to all the rest within reason itself, and, as in an organized body, the purpose of each member can only be deduced from the perfect concept of the whole.
1783
Limestone statuette of a male votary (worshipper)
mid-6th century BCE
His fear was so great that, without considering whether it was possible or reasonable that it could be her, [...] he fled, trembling.
1518-1527
The interest of priests is not that the citizen acts well, but that he does not think.
1772
Is it any wonder that I love solitude? I see only animosity on the faces of men, & nature always smiles at me.
1776-1778
All the actions we produce [...] are of a more perfect nature the more capable they are of uniting with us so as to form [...] one and the same nature.
c. 1660
Spatula or curette
7000 BCE - 330 CE
Sciences and their inventions spread immediately and fly everywhere; for science is communicated as easily as light.
1609
[...] it is better to suffer an injury than to inflict one.
45 BC
Having recognized that the social antagonism of classes was at the bottom of all political struggles, it applied itself to studying the conditions under which one class of society can and must be called upon to represent the whole of the interests of a nation [...].
1851-1852
[Virtue] does not speak to us of superfluous austerities [...]; its sole project is to make its disciples and all men content, if possible, and to bring about their happiness at every moment of their existence.
1751
Portrait of a Man
1741
We know that each Creature has a private Interest, a well-being of its own, towards which it strives with all its power.
1745
[...] duration, whose essence is to flow ceaselessly, and to exist, consequently, only for a consciousness and a memory.
1890
Without me, you can do nothing.
1263-1264
Wherever men are ignorant, there will be prophets, inspired ones, miracle-workers; [...] this trade will always diminish in the same proportion as nations become enlightened.
1766
Baron Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859)
1859