Modesty [...] announces a distrust of one's own judgment, & a suitable deference for that of others; this quality is, especially in young people, a sure sign of wit & sense.
1751
[The beautiful one], knowing she is beautiful, strikes a pose, which makes us deliberately ignore her beauty; while [the ugly one], knowing she is ugly, effaces herself, which makes us deliberately ignore her ugliness.
4th century BC
He who says in the evening, 'I have lived,' can say in the morning, 'I am gaining a day.'
63-64 AD
It is a general law of all our movements, that the more they are repeated, the easier and faster they become; and the easier and faster they are, the less perceptible they are.
1801
Carlo Rimbotti (1518–1591)
1548
I preferred to draw the storms upon myself rather than upon the fatherland.
September 57 BC
I am [...] very far from regarding [the concepts of cause and substance] as a mere product of experience [...]. I have rather proved [...] that they are [...] prior to all experience, and that they have an indisputable objective validity, but only in relation to experience.
1783
Conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the dissenting opinion is necessary to supply the rest of the truth of which the received doctrine realizes only a part.
1859
It is impossible to honor those one despises, nor to willingly obey those one hates and holds in horror.
c. 1552-1553
A Brazilian Landscape
1650
Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the oldest and longest history of man teaches us — and in punishment too there is so much that is festive!
1887
All saints are therefore lights; but it is by believing in Jesus Christ that they are enlightened by him, from whom one cannot be separated without falling back into darkness.
1263-1264
Who would not admire such magnanimity? Who [...] would not be interested in the actions of a man who buys such peril so dearly [...] to be led at night into the midst of enemies, where he will fight for his own life, with no other pledge than the hope of a noble deed?
100-120 AD
Throughout our lives, we possess only the present and nothing more.
1851
Bronze handle of a hydria (water jar)
4th century BCE
It is impossible that anyone could voluntarily make his condition miserable [...] if he were not prompted to it by a false Judgment.
1689
In all that requires practice, do not claim to have what practice alone gives; leave the advantage to those who have practiced, and be content with your tranquility.
c. 108 AD
[...] all these tender reminiscences made me shed tears for my bygone youth and for its raptures, now lost to me forever.
1782-1789
The passion for material well-being is essentially a middle-class passion; it grows and spreads with this class; it becomes predominant with it.
1835-1840
Still Life with Jar, Cup, and Apples
ca. 1877
It often happens that we are esteemed in proportion as we esteem ourselves.
1746
Do you not see that the courts [...], offended by a defense, have often put innocent men to death, and often acquitted the guilty whose words had moved their pity or flattered their ears?
4th century BC
It is the particular rules, on the contrary, which, directly and without intermediary, bind the will at every moment.
1893
It is amidst civil dissensions, foreign war, [...] battles and perils of all kinds, [...] that we must place the humble and glorious cradle [of philosophy].
c. 350 B.C.E.
Marble portrait head of Antinoos
ca. 130–138 CE
[It is a] proposition as absurd as if a fish, which cannot live out of water, were to say: If there is no eternal life for me, I want to leave the water to live on land.
c. 1660
Treaties imposed by force will be observed neither by a prince nor by a republic.
1855
The vanity of their erudition, leading them to judge before they understand, causes them to fall into gross errors of which other men are not capable.
1674-1675
Everything is born, develops, and grows only through the alteration and transformation of another.
1580
Head of the Virgin
1636
I see no necessity that obliges us to affirm that no trace of a perception remains when there is not enough of it to remember having had it.
1704
You are not [...] among those pusillanimous thinkers who believe that truth can be harmful: it harms only those who deceive men, and it will always be useful to the rest of humankind.
1766
There are never more inhabitants in a country than the number it can feed.
1776
One has thus oscillated from idealism to realism and from realism to idealism, but so rapidly that one has believed oneself to be motionless and, as it were, straddling the two systems combined into one.
1919
Bronze statuette of a sphinx
ca. 1st century BCE–2nd century CE
Ah! Woe to him who would keep all his wits about him in my place; such a man would have a very cold heart.
1741-1784
Who then, in the labor movement or so-called, had the courage to think and say, during the period of high wages, that the working class was being debased and corrupted?
1934-1942
[Original books] mark an epoch in the history of the human mind, and it is from their principles that one rises to new discoveries.
1772
Any mediating being between God and the universe is therefore a being of the imagination.
1841
Hoof, cow
7000 BCE - 330 CE
[...] heroism [...] receives a mortal blow only when [its] weaknesses are declared.
1636
I found these words a little harsh.
1764
The study of modes of production constitutes [...] the materialist supersession of philosophy. [...] [Philosophy] is already superseded in the real development of which it was only the distorted reflection.
1841
If they are dealing with people [...] who have only pride joined with much malignity [...], let them be well persuaded that they must begin by divesting themselves of all that can bring them honor.
1620
The "Kearsarge" at Boulogne
1864
It is not enough for the soul to be lodged in the human body, like a pilot in his ship, [...] but it must be more closely joined and united with it, to [...] compose a true man.
1637
There is no poet so bad that he does not have followers.
1926
You will easily admit that nature, not in its whole, but in its parts, suffers violence by the movement of some overcoming the resistance of others; this is what God uses for the ornament and variety of the world.
1653-1662
Ulysses is true wisdom, which, without being captivated by material charms [...], turns all its desires towards the heavens.
c. 253-270 AD
Portrait of a Woman, Called the Marchesa Durazzo
probably ca. 1622–25