It is not possible to judge wrongly, just as it is not possible to feel wrongly.
1805
Suffering is the foundation of all life.
1819
[A monarch] applied himself solely to marking his reign by the perfect felicity of his People.
1627
Justice [...] means minding one's own business and not meddling with other men's concerns.
c. 375 BC
Eye Miniature
1800
The straightest tree will be the first to be cut down. The well with the sweetest water will be the first to run dry. Your knowledge scares the ignorant, your enlightenment offends the fools.
4th century BC
It seems to me that one must know how to grow old, and that the flowers of spring are not made for winter.
1715-1778
True education consists less in precepts than in exercises.
1762
Ronsard and Baïf praised him.
c. 1552-1553
Madame la Comtesse de Boufflers and Thérèse
mid-1760s
Know that all those who have saved, helped, and enlarged their homeland have a place prepared for them in heaven, where they will enjoy endless bliss.
54-51 BC
Great men are always the same, whatever their fortune: if it varies, whether exalting or oppressing them, they alone do not change.
1513-1519
Criticisms are drawn from five types [of ideas]: [the work is presented] as either impossible, inconsistent, harmful, contradictory, or [...] contrary to the rules of art.
c. 335 BC
[...] I do not doubt at all that one can deduce, from self-evident Propositions [...] the true measures of Right and Wrong by consequences [...] as incontestable as those used in Mathematics.
1689
Dancers, Pink and Green
ca. 1890
He was not without suspicions and fears regarding him.
100-120 AD
The self touches the external world by its surface [...]. But as we dig below this surface, as the self becomes more itself, its states of consciousness also cease to be juxtaposed in order to interpenetrate [...].
1889
One considers oneself poor and miserably housed if the walls of our baths do not gleam with ornaments whose size equals their richness [...].
63-64 AD
The working classes, [...] barely awakening, not to a knowledge, but to a mere instinct of their social position and their own line of political conduct, could only make themselves heard by means of noisy demonstrations.
1851-1852
Limestone inscribed base
3900 BCE - 100 CE
Ten years earlier, this work would have been entirely new; but today the philosophical spirit has made so much progress that one finds few new things in it...
1773
The most courageous and natural attitude towards death is to see it coming not only without surprise, but also without preoccupation.
1580
One must continually make new efforts to acquire this continual newness of spirit.
1656-1657
Pity is the imagination or fiction of a future misfortune for ourselves, produced by the feeling of another's misfortune.
1772
Madonna and Child
1425
Such is the blessed condition of the intelligible world that in doing nothing it does great things, and in remaining within itself it produces important works.
c. 253-270 AD
Space is not a substance, but an attribute [...]. Space is immense, immutable, and eternal; and the same must be said of duration.
1715-1716
The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs [...].
1859
It seems that nature gave us the full use of our senses at the very instant it formed them [...].
1754
Fragment of a statuette of a woman
4th–3rd centuries BCE
When false zeal joins with hatred, it shields it from the reproaches of reason, and justifies it in such a way that one would feel scruples not to follow its movements.
1674-1675
The mood to write verses comes from a strong agitation of the spirits [...] which only disposes one to poetry. [...] I take this transport as a mark of a stronger and more elevated mind than the common.
1643-1649
Political institutions had not become worse; on the contrary, they had greatly improved; but political life had become more active.
1856
Whoever wants to know exactly what he is worth can only learn it from the public, and must therefore expose himself to its judgment.
1758
Bronze statuette of Athena
ca. 2nd–3rd century CE
We would like everything that has value to be eternal. Yet everything that has value is the product of an encounter [...].
1947
Even misfortune has its charms in great extremities; for this opposition of fortune elevates a courageous spirit, and makes it gather all its forces which it was not using.
1746
Genius is almost always accompanied by a strong propensity for play; great men, in their moments of relaxation, readily behave like children [...].
1926
From 'every man is an animal', it does not follow that 'every animal is a man', for 'animal' says more than 'man'.
c. 1270
Marble portrait head of Antinoos
ca. 130–138 CE
Good and evil, both natural and moral, are only a matter of taste and feeling.
1742
It is thought to be a holy thing to have no confidence in reason and in one's own judgment [...]; but this is not piety, it is madness.
1670
One must always see the symptom of some obstacle in the fact that an artist interrupts his creative work to present himself to the world as a theorist.
1896
What this contingency indicates [...] is that these acts [beyond duty] are not necessary, are not adjusted to any vital purpose, in a word are a luxury; which is to say that they belong to the domain of art.
1893
View in the Stables of the Villa of Maecenas, Tivoli
ca. 1805–10
[...] we can never, with all our reason, go beyond the field of experience.
1783
Prosperity [...] is but a fleeting state: it is a kind of game [...] where the most skillful is the one who knows when to quit while they're ahead.
1636
Let us know that [...] it is an impious desire in man to wish never to die. It is like the wish never to ripen, never to be cut.
c. 108 AD
How could I bear to be a man, if man were not also a poet, a solver of riddles, and a redeemer of chance!
1883-1885
Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome and Mary Magdalen
ca. 1490