Judgments are [...] either merely subjective, when representations are related to a single consciousness in one subject, or they are objective when they are united in a consciousness in general, that is to say [...] necessary.
1783
Vanity [...] consists in such an immoderate display of one's own advantages [...] that it can only offend others by shocking, without measure, their ambition and their secret vanity.
1751
The will of a single man is highly variable and highly inconstant.
1677
From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think.
1637
Limestone male figure in Egyptian dress
mid-6th century BCE
The opinion of another about you, in which class of things does it fall? — In those that do not depend on my free will.
c. 108 AD
Men [...] are all susceptible to the same degree of passion; their unequal strength is always [...] the effect of the different situations in which chance places them.
1772
If any innovator has ever had prompt success, it is because he has only declared [...] opinions that were already simmering in every mind.
1805
Today, [when a government has spendthrift passions], loans are made whose immediate effect is almost unnoticed, and whose final result will only be felt by the next generation.
1856
Portrait of a Woman
1790
Intention alone decides the moral value [...] of a given act, so much so that the same act, depending on the agent's intention, can be either blameworthy or praiseworthy.
1840
The spelling is very inconsistent, varying for the same word within the same copy.
1643-1662
The prince who is the cause of another's greatness is himself ruined.
1855
I can only meditate when walking; as soon as I stop, I no longer think, and my mind only moves with my feet.
1782-1789
Head of a satyr
2nd century BCE
Truly foolish is the one who tires their mind and wears out their body to reach such an end.
4th century BC
This principle of nature to act by the most determined ways [...] is, in effect, only architectonic, yet it never fails to observe it.
1697
I do believe that [such a poet] never knew, in a literary sense, what he was doing.
1926
Justice is the feeling of a soul in love with order, and which is content with its own.
1746
Limestone Bes
late 6th–early 5th century BCE
It is this zeal, derived from divine love, which is the source of the persecutions and furies of which Christianity has so often been guilty.
1766
No body could have become larger if there is only a simple addition, and if it does not change itself entirely [...] as a result of some change that occurs within it.
c. 350 B.C.E.
These swallows that go [...] are the messengers of spring.
1546/1563
[Astrologers] predicted to me that I would die at the age of thirty-two. I have had the mischief of deceiving them for nearly thirty years now, for which I humbly beg their pardon.
1764
Portrait of a Man
1765
Which of his readers does he not send away with a calmer heart! Can one, overwhelmed with sadness, pick up one of his books and not feel cheerfulness reborn?
45 BC
The most divine [maxim] has always seemed to be 'Know thyself'; and it was precisely this maxim that constituted for [the philosopher] the starting point of his doubts and inquiries.
1st Century A.D.
...one cannot be blamed if, in certain circumstances, we take advantage of the enemy's mistakes, just as [...] we take advantage of their cowardice.
1580
He who wants to learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance: one cannot learn to fly straight away!
1883-1885
The Spinner
1653
There is as great a distance from Philosophy to Impiety as from Religion to Fanaticism; but from Fanaticism to Barbarism, there is only one step.
1745
Evil is infinite in the sense of the indeterminate [...]. Over this kind of infinity, only the true infinite prevails.
1947
Every being has an act which is its image, so that as soon as the being exists, its act also exists, and as long as the being subsists, its act radiates more or less far.
c. 253-270 AD
[The orator] is like those who dance, who always finish where they began.
1674-1675
Haystacks: Autumn
ca. 1874
[A life plan...] is to indulge the body only as much as is necessary for health.
63-64 AD
It is equality of origin that compels us to seek an equality founded on law.
c. 387 BC
[...] as war removes all freedom from commerce, the surplus will cease to pass from one nation to another.
1776
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain freedom, but to preserve and enlarge it.
1690
Portrait of a Man, Possibly an Architect or Geographer
1597
To its [history's] faith are committed the examples of our ancestors, the vicissitudes of things, the foundations of civil prudence [...].
1623
Instead of revenge [...], [the heroic heart] forgives an unjust hatred, and [...] even returns good for evil.
1636
[...] succession is an abstract of the motor effort exerted in space, an effort which, having become conscious, is intention.
1890
[He] was truly one of those all-too-rare men who, by giving everything within them until nothing is left, thereby show themselves to be related to genius.
1896
Engraving
18th century
By selling the commodity at its value, [...] the capitalist must necessarily derive a profit from the sale.
1865
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
Society only lends this binding force to contracts that have a social value in themselves, that is, which conform to the rules of law.
1893
Meaning is to a noun as its form, while the letter or syllables are its matter.
c. 1270
Terracotta statuette of a woman
3rd century BCE