The perfume [...] is the symbol of justice [...]. Cover the feet of Jesus with perfumes through a holy life, follow the Lord's footsteps, [...] if you have a surplus, give it to the poor, and you will have wiped the Lord's feet.
1263-1264
I do not hinder myself.
c. 108 AD
For is what thought refuses anything other than what reason rejects?
1670
One who believes himself the master of others is nonetheless a greater slave than they.
1762
Bronze oinochoe (jug)
late 6th century BCE
I would never advise anyone to read [me], except those who would wish to [...] meditate seriously, and who can detach their minds from the commerce of the senses and [...] from all sorts of prejudices.
1641
Wherever an imminent danger appears, one will find more steadfastness in a republic than in a prince.
1855
There is no finer sight than a city governed by a wise prince; while the most odious of all sights is to see it governed by a tyrant.
100-120 AD
Nothing is more common than people who give advice, nothing rarer than those who help.
1764
Die-counter or draught piece
3900 BCE - 100 CE
One should judge people by their deeds rather than their words.
c. 380 BC
Novels [...] have created [...] a whole false view of existence and awakened expectations that cannot be fulfilled. This very frequently exerts the most unfortunate influence on their entire life.
1909
All purely positive, or absolute, reality is a perfection; and imperfection comes from limitation, that is, from the privative.
1710
[The apparatus of law], far from diminishing, is growing and becoming more and more complicated.
1893
Terracotta head of a woman wearing a high headdress
late 5th century BCE
learn [...] to know themselves, by seeing themselves placed between an infinity and a nothingness [...]. From which one can learn to value oneself at one's true worth, and to form reflections that are worth more than all the rest of geometry itself.
circa 1658
Whatever has reached its natural proportions can grow no more.
63-64 AD
Indeed, when I imagine man completely naked [...] his flaws, his natural subjection, and his imperfections, I find that we have had more reason than any other animal to cover ourselves.
1580
[Das Kapital] (1867), which is his main work as a writer.
March 17, 1883
Fragment of a limestone votive relief with a quadriga (?)
4th century BCE
We can regard science as a kind of monster, since it excites the admiration, or rather the stupid astonishment of the ignorant who see it as a sort of prodigy.
1609
The superior man considers worries to be handcuffs and shackles.
4th century BC
I confess, children are not born in this full state of equality, though they are born to it. [...] Their parents have a sort of rule over them [...] but it is only temporary.
1690
We should not be surprised by the difference in our reasoning when we are currently animated by a passion [...] and when we reflect on it calmly. In both cases, we are not really operating on the same perceptions.
1805
Pilate Washing His Hands
probably 1660s
So, one absolutely must laugh? You have hurt an honest man [...] and you have lost an opportunity to pay homage to true merit.
1740s
There is no portion of literature that is connected by closer and more numerous ties to the current state of society than the theater.
1835-1840
She does not suspect, therefore, that she owes her ways of being to external causes.
1754
One must be a small man to desire small things.
1758
Haystacks: Autumn
ca. 1874
One ends up accustomed to using [examples] as formulas rather than as principles.
1781
[...] 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
[Reason] is of all things in this world the most harmful to a reasonable being: God leaves reason only to those he wishes to damn, he removes it in his goodness from those he wishes to save.
1768
[...] the two mediocre fellows understood nothing of the genius that was revealing itself to them.
1926
Limestone finial of a funerary stele
late 5th or early 4th century BCE
Thales [...] laid the foundations of philosophy in Greece.
45 BC
When our [thing] is thus regulated and reformed, it will seem entirely new [...]. The abuses drove them away, and the reformation would call them back.
c. 1552-1553
Desire is unlimited in its object, and limited in its principle [...] by the fatigue that condemns it to death in advance.
1932-1942
The same infirmities, the same weaknesses, the same fragility, are to be noted in all stations; the same subjection to death, which puts such a short and formidable end to human greatness.
1746
Portrait of a Man
1741
Good and evil, both natural and moral, are only a matter of taste and feeling.
1742
There is no essential difference between a wooden image and an imaginative image [...] The adoration of the sculpted or painted image [...] is but the external, physical manifestation of the inner, spiritual adoration.
1841
Absolute rest, driven out by the understanding, is restored by the imagination.
1922
This happy and natural disposition for the truth consists in being able to choose the true and flee the false. This is what those who are naturally gifted do with ease.
End of the 4th century BC
Faience amulet of an animal-headed god
664–334 BCE
Of Mixtion where there is total penetration.
c. 253-270 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 "apparent world" is the only real one: the "true world" is merely added by a lie...
1888
I call a fool the one who, having committed a folly, does not have the wit and care to smother it on the spot.
1636
Marble torso of a seated man
1st or 2nd century CE