There is [...] a country in the world [...] where they have a way of thinking, especially in morality, which is diametrically opposed to ours.
1751
Justice is a mean between excess and deficiency, between too much and too little.
4th century BC
What one loses in [another's] mind through lack of success is far greater than what one gains from applause.
1765-1769
Each one must bear the penalty for his own crime, and a man should not be made odious or suspect for the fault another has committed.
1686
Marble cornice fragment
2nd century CE
All pleasure and all pain are born in the soul.
c. 360 BC
An image remains essentially an image everywhere, whether sculpted and painted, or simply imaginative [...] and in adoring the god it represents, one cannot help but adore it at the same time.
1841
I find, in many things, more order in my morals than in my opinion, and my appetites less debauched than my reason.
1580
It is when human intelligence is at the end of its resources and declares its powerlessness that the help of God arrives.
1263-1264
Saints Michael and Francis
ca. 1505–9
All our adequate ideas are true.
1670
The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man [...] that he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.
1861
Clarity adorns profound thoughts.
1747
It is to live badly to always be beginning to live.
63-64 AD
Man with a Celestial Globe
1624
The carriages will always be emblazoned with the arms and crests of the City of Paris, and the coachmen dressed in a blue coat.
1662
All language speaks too slowly for me: — I leap into your chariot, storm!
1883-1885
If the fact is true, one must nonetheless take all these precautions in recounting it; otherwise, the truth can often seem implausible.
86-82 BC
Apposition is the contact of bodies at their surfaces, as in heaps of wheat.
c. 253-270 AD
John Churchill (1650–1722), First Duke of Marlborough
1698
Wherever an imminent danger appears, one will find more steadfastness in a republic than in a prince.
1855
[The spirit of the Sage is] superior to heaven, to earth, to all beings, dwells in a body to which it is not attached, [...] and knows everything through global knowledge in its motionless unity.
4th century BC
The garment of the church is a garment of many colors.
1623
One cannot suffer admiration for antiquity to become the master of reason, and for it to be, as it were, forbidden to use one's mind to examine the sentiments of the ancients.
1674-1675
Portrait of a Woman
1778
[The Creator] should only concur in the way that he concurs in all other natural things.
1696
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
1851/1852
The moments in which we thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is why we are rarely free.
1889
Right must not be adjusted to politics, but politics must indeed be adjusted to right.
1797
Terracotta female head
late 3rd–2nd century BCE
Freedom does not belong to the empirical character, but solely to the intelligible character. [...] It is in one's 'Esse' (Being) that freedom is found. One could have been other.
1840
[Witty remarks and bold actions] have often been like wings to suddenly reach the summit of greatness.
1636
In small towns, anyone who seeks to emancipate themselves from received customs meets with resistance that is sometimes very strong.
1893
[Sentient beings] can only differ in the extent of their knowledge by the number and perfection of their means of feeling.
1805
Limestone male figure in Egyptian dress
mid-6th century BCE
'My wife treats me badly.' [...] Is there anything else to it? No.
c. 108 AD
By looking at the world [...], we find encouragement [...] in considering how blind forces [...] are brought to converge into a unity, by something we do not understand, but which we call beauty.
1943
He is in a pit that the barbarians call a prison.
1772
[...] even after such a dreadful setback, he had regarded surrendering himself as the most shameful step.
100-120 AD
Marble statue of Tyche-Fortuna restored with the portrait head of a woman
1st or 2nd century CE
A deaf enemy of temporal power, the priesthood, according to the times and the character of kings, humors them or insults them.
1772
Human life can be compared to a race [...] where one has no other goal and no other reward than to outpace one's competitors.
1772
There can be no doubt that we are naturally free, since we are all companions, and it cannot enter anyone's mind that nature has placed anyone in servitude [...].
c. 1552-1553
[...] a wife's infidelity almost always stems from the husband's inadequacy. Hence also the ridicule of deceived spouses, [...] of those who did not know how to make themselves loved.
1926
Interior of a Kitchen
ca. 1642–44
I hold it as an incontestable maxim that whoever has seen only one people, instead of knowing men, knows only the people with whom he has lived.
1762
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
The origin of these signs was forgotten as soon as their use became familiar; and people fell into the error of believing that they were the most natural names for spiritual things.
1746
Since no material cause presented itself to the senses, one would have attributed it to its opposite, the immaterial.
1643-1649
Terracotta head of a youth
2nd century BCE (?)