Have no scruples [...] about mocking the superstitions that debase human nature.
1765
April, the sweet hope of fruits [...] which nourish their young infancy.
1546/1563
I know no other way of dealing with great tasks than play.
1888
The desire to see others suffer exactly what one suffers. This is why [...] the grudges of the wretched are directed at their own kind.
1947
Bronze support in the form of a ram's head and foreleg
1st century BCE–1st century CE
To carry one's mind back into the past, and make it, so to speak, ancient [...] is an immense and delicate work.
1623
Did all these important things, then, depend on so little?
c. 108 AD
Ministers need war to make themselves necessary [...] and to destroy the State if necessary, rather than lose their position.
1762
We only remember having been ignorant of that which we remember having learned [...].
1754
Madame Bergeret de Frouville as Diana
1756
In man, everything is physical sensation.
1772
The agreement of the parties cannot make a clause just which is not just in itself, and there are rules of justice whose violation social justice must prevent [...].
1893
One wants to believe, but does not know what to believe; for when one wants to know what one wants to believe [...] these phantoms [...] often go up in smoke.
1674-1675
The horses [...] took the bit in their teeth at a point on the bridge where there was no guardrail, and plunged into the water.
1643-1662
The Assumption of the Virgin
ca. 1337–39
That virtue alone is sufficient for a happy life. [...] Although it seems difficult to be persuaded of this, because of the vicissitudes of fortune, it is a maxim of such importance that every effort must be made to convince minds of it.
45 BC
[The Communist Manifesto] has become the profession of faith for the majority of European socialists.
March 17, 1883
Most often, revolutions in aristocracies happen without being noticed and through imperceptible destruction.
c. 350 BCE
And the happy thing is, this is my last journey.
1741-1784
Castle by a River
1647
Books are but assemblies of words. Words convey ideas. But true ideas derive from a non-sensible principle, and can hardly be better expressed in words than it can.
4th century BC
[A subject of study is] the supreme ideal that any society can set for itself.
1677
[Theology], this divine science, has often only appeared more entangled as a result.
1768
Without realizing it, one sometimes substitutes for the supposedly mobile system a multiplicity of distinct systems [...], which one nevertheless continues to treat as a single system.
1922
Portrait of a Woman
1838
Good God! Save me from my friends; I will guard myself from my adversaries.
1893
As they spare no one, so no one spares them; and were they at the height of elevation, the last of men will believe himself entitled to strike at them.
1636
Contradiction is an opposition which in itself admits no middle ground.
c. 1270
The Analysis of the Laws of nature, and the search for causes, leads us to God [...].
1697
Fragmentary marble sarcophagus with scenes from the Oresteia
mid-2nd century CE
War indeed allows as lawful many practices that are condemnable outside of it.
1580
The continual contradictions in the world caused by pride [...] have forced the introduction of the rules of propriety or politeness, in order to facilitate the commerce of the mind and of conversation.
1751
By using almost no commonplaces, no clichés, [...] by choosing his words one by one, [the author] had given the slightest of his descriptions a quality of novelty.
1926
Art will only attain a high degree of dignity 'when it is understood, no longer alongside and outside of life, but as an integral part of it [...]'.
1896
Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834)
1785
It is expressly forbidden to speak well of one another.
16th century
Let all the noises of the world rise up outside, provided that within me no tumult occurs, that desire and fear do not fight there.
63-64 AD
[...] our perceptions are everything to us, and [...] they alone are for us the true real things.
1805
The misuse of Words is a great obstacle to Knowledge.
1689
The French Comedians
ca. 1720
Everyone is much more jealous of the advantages of the mind than of the estimable qualities of the will, and [...] no one would hesitate for a moment to declare for [knavery] rather than for [foolishness].
1764
If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.
c. 375 BC
[The only] remedy [...] is to divert one's imagination and senses as much as possible, and to use only the understanding to consider them.
1643-1649
God must not fight for the cowardly: for the law wills that in war one saves one's life by valor and not by prayers.
c. 253-270 AD
Terracotta statuette of a woman
3rd century BCE
A man of good faith, but not a simpleton.
100-120 AD
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 brain, with its function of knowing, is basically just a lookout established by the will, to serve those of its ends which are located outside.
1819
Others spend their lives doubting and arguing, without bothering about the subjects of their disputes and their doubts.
1746
Hendrickje Stoffels (1626–1663)
mid-1650s