One must entirely deliver the mind from all sorts of sad thoughts, and even also from all sorts of serious meditations concerning the sciences.
1643-1649
There are acts that are weak and obscure, others hidden, others powerful that radiate far.
c. 253-270 AD
There is no philosophical idea, however profound or subtle, that cannot and should not be expressed in everyday language.
1915
As I suffer an unjust death, [...] the shame does not fall upon me, but upon those who have condemned me.
4th century BC
A Man Leaning on a Parapet
ca. 1881
To have the right to [abolish it], one would have to either rely on contradictory testimony or incriminate the impartiality of those through whom the account was transmitted.
1643-1662
The director fully adopted our views, but he was faced with the author's resistance. He went ahead anyway.
1926
The crime that must be punished most severely is the one against which it is most difficult to guard oneself. We can hide from strangers, but there are no secrets from intimacy.
79 BC
Regarding metaphysical minds of consummate penetration, one would have to be very inexperienced to believe that one could still add anything to their knowledge, or subtract anything from their opinion.
1763
Virgin and Child
ca. 1485
What is space, this omnipresent nothingness outside of which nothing can exist without ceasing to be?
1819
Be careful he does not deceive you; these parasites are not accustomed to acting in good faith.
1518
We too must [...] be able to converse with ourselves; to do without others; to need no distraction; to reflect [...] on our relationship with the rest of the world.
c. 108 AD
By conceivable things, I do not mean only those which are rigorously demonstrated, but also those which our mind can embrace with moral certainty [...].
1670
The Love Song
1868–77
Many popular religions, judging by the conceptions of common men, are truly a kind of demonism.
1757
[In Rome], there were people who said that what made the feast venerable was less the birth of Jesus than the return [...] of the sun.
1764
Common thought always has ready-made abstract predicates, which it separates from the subject. All philosophers have made predicates into subjects themselves.
1841
[...] memory [...] would not consist in a facility to operate resulting from certain modifications of their being, but in an immutable order of God[...]
1674-1675
Fragmentary marble sarcophagus with scenes from the Oresteia
mid-2nd century CE
Hearing by itself is not meant to give us the idea of distance [...] the idea it provides is still the most imperfect of all.
1746
Whoever acts in such a way as to increase the incompatibility [between obligations] is a promoter of disorder. Whoever acts in such a way as to diminish it is a factor of order.
1943
The contradiction in the existence of God.
1841
It is certain that nothing is rarer among human writings than a history that is well-made and accomplished in all its points.
1623
Limestone inscribed block
3900 BCE - 100 CE
[...] it is supposed that this natural union could not be approved by heaven if the ceremonies of a priest did not render it valid.
1766
The enemy must be repelled at the very frontier: if he penetrates it and seizes the gates of the fortress, will [the soul] receive the order to stop from a captive?
c. 41 AD
The love of power and the love of liberty are in an eternal antagonism. Where liberty is less, the passion for power is more ardent and more shameless.
1869
Life and death being equally indifferent to him, the collapse of the universe would cause him no emotion.
4th century BC
Bronze sphinx
late 6th century–early 5th century BCE
The gods are mockers: it even seems they cannot help but laugh during sacred ceremonies.
1886
One only truly knows one's own sorrows.
1760
For it is the mark of a man in love with himself, and not with the beautiful and the honest, to believe himself more perfect than others.
100-120 AD
April, the grace, and the smile [...], the scent and the sweet breath.
1546/1563
Statuette of a warrior-10
7000 BCE - 30 BCE
The number and importance of the prohibitions that isolate a sacred thing [...] correspond to the degree of sacredness with which it is invested.
1912
There is nothing more pernicious than [sudden and undeserved elevation] offered to the eyes of a democratic people. [It] finishes by precipitating its heart down a slope where everything pulls it.
1835-1840
[...] nothing being so pleasing to the Eye as Truth is to the Mind, nothing being so deformed, nor so incompatible with the Understanding as a Lie.
1689
The principle of sufficient reason alone makes all these phantoms of the imagination disappear. Men easily create fictions for want of properly using this great principle.
1715-1716
Terracotta female head
late 3rd–2nd century BCE
What the evening is to the day, old age is to life. One will therefore say: 'the evening, old age of the day,' and 'old age, evening of life'.
c. 335 BC
In this final scene between death and us, there is no more pretending; one must speak plainly [...] and show what is real and good at the bottom of our hearts.
1580
Few people have a mind deep enough to reconcile so many truths, and to strip them of the errors with which they are mixed.
1746
Everything we feel and perceive is quite certain and very real for us; we are not even susceptible to any other certainty or reality.
1817
A Female Allegorical Figure
ca. 1740–50
It is much easier for [God] to do the works He willed than it is for us to recount them.
1263-1264
Merit [...] produces envy, as the body produces a shadow. Envy announces merit as smoke announces fire and flame.
1772
How can one have enough cruelty to see a wretched person in such long and undeserved torment?
1757-1758
How common it is for a happy man to deceive himself about the immutability of his happiness!
1636
Sibylle
ca. 1870