The dilettante considers the thing as an end; the professional, only as a means. [...] It is from such men, and not from mercenaries, that the greatest things have always come.
1905
We depend all the more closely on common opinion the more closely it watches all our actions.
1893
Paternal power [...] is nothing other than the power that fathers and mothers have over their children, to govern them in a way that is useful and advantageous.
1690
It is to make oneself a slave against the will of God to submit to the false appearances of truth.
1674-1675
Terracotta horse and rider
ca. 750–600 BCE
Their credulity has been so strongly seized that they think they see what they do not see.
1580
That this horror or reluctance which all bodies have is not greater for admitting a large void than a small one.
1647
Art, without the assiduous practice of speech, is not of great help, from which you must conclude that practice must be joined to precepts.
86-82 BC
The history of a nation can only be written very late; [...] one must start over twenty times, like ants whose dwelling has been trampled underfoot.
1756
Chlorite pestle
ca. 1600–1050 BCE
The wicked are at bottom the greatest dupes, for they have sacrificed the happiness of enjoying [...] the pleasure of being virtuous, to acquire trifles of no value.
1751
Where, then, are important good and evil to be found in man? There where his superiority lies.
c. 108 AD
It is with words that we reason about ideas [...]. What we call reasoning is to make judgments that follow from the first ones.
1805
Every man calls Good that which is pleasing to himself and calls Evil that which displeases him. [...] there exists no absolute goodness considered without relation.
1772
David at the Cave of Adullam
1810
We have failed in our inquiry and have not found what courage is.
c. 380 BC
Is not wounded vanity the mother of all tragedies? But where pride is wounded, something better than it grows.
1883-1885
No one has yet found the art [...] of taking fortune's pulse and reliably discovering its impending ill will towards us.
1636
The surest indication one can have of a man's character is to know the people he associates with.
1855
Graziella
1878
My soul, proof against fortune, has known no true good or evil except those that do not depend on it.
1782-1789
Public opinion [...] creates between [men] a kind of imaginary equality, despite the real inequality of their conditions.
1835-1840
From an early age, he wanted to write verses that would resemble no one else's...
1926
It is for the sake of wicked men that laws must be established.
1869
Portrait of a Man
ca. 1520–25
This is the beginning of the first Olympian ode by Pindar.
c. 1552-1553
Impossible to forgive someone who has harmed us, if that harm diminishes us. We must think that it has not diminished us, but has revealed our true level.
1947
There remains, then, a single resource [...]: it is to start anew all the work of the human understanding, to never leave it to itself, but to take hold of it from the very beginning.
1620
[Know that] what is not cannot be born, that what exists does not perish, that the coming together of certain substances is what is called generation, and that their dissolution constitutes death.
1st Century A.D.
View in the Stables of the Villa of Maecenas, Tivoli
ca. 1805–10
Boredom is a more general and powerful force in the universe than one might imagine.
1758
The people know that wheat must be cheap [...] but they are ignorant of the means [...] of reconciling the vicissitudes of harvests with their need, which does not vary.
1741-1784
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
The effeminate man fears to die, when he has already made a death of his own life!
63-64 AD
Bronze dagger
ca. 1750–1450 BCE
[...] science as a reflection reproducing real development, in opposition to ideology as a distorting reflection of that same development.
1841
The proposition [...] is an enunciation which, being posited, entails another.
c. 1270
A will that would always let itself be guided by chance would be scarcely better for the government of the universe than the fortuitous concourse of corpuscles.
1710
Farmers, as the primary cause of production, seem [...] to hold all citizens in their dependence. It is their labor that sustains them.
1776
Man in a Red Cloak
1625
...the moral law demands that the greatest good of which we are capable be realized.
1793
As long as a Sage's doctrine has not been refuted, it is not over for him. [...] My doctrine is irrefutable, and I will not deviate from it for any persecution.
4th century BC
Delicacy comes essentially from the soul.
1746
...perfect health [...] is the foundation of all other goods one can have in this life.
1643-1649
Apple Blossoms
1873
If [fatal necessity is] granted, [...] all rewards and all punishments are in vain.
1661-1676
[Evil] consists in privation, that is, in what the efficient cause does not do. This is why the Scholastics used to call the cause of evil deficient.
c. 253-270 AD
[The second characteristic of freedom] is the ability left to each to live as he pleases; this [...] is the mark of liberty, as it is the mark of slavery not to have free will.
c. 350 BCE
Before we can philosophize, we must live; and life demands that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right nor to the left, but straight ahead.
1911
Bronze batillum (incense shovel)
late 1st–early 2nd century CE