The meditation of divine things should have made [a man] gentle and charitable; yet what comes from him often seems proud, fierce, and full of harshness.
1686
Does it not seem to you that I have been preparing for it all my life? [...] By living without committing the slightest injustice, which is, in my eyes, the most beautiful way to prepare a defense.
4th century BC
[...] the progress of the moral sciences never precedes and indeed only follows from afar that of the physical and mathematical sciences [...].
1797-1798
Little by little, the people grow accustomed to irreverence towards the magistrate, [...] learn to disobey willingly, and let themselves be led by the bait of liberty, or rather license, which is the sweetest and most tantalizing poison in the world.
c. 1552-1553
A Jaguar Devouring a Deer
after 1840
The spirit of evil and nature are one, and where nature is not tamed, the evil spirit is not tamed either.
1851
Why are celibacy, fasting, macerations, self-denial, humility [...] and all monastic virtues rejected by all sensible men? It is because they lead to nothing.
1751
Frugality is voluntary poverty.
63-64 AD
All legally practical principles must contain rigorous truths, and [...] they can never admit of exceptions, for these would destroy the universality to which alone they owe their name as principles.
1797
The Calling of Saint Matthew
ca. 1625–30
One could say [of the artist] that he has given a voice to everything in nature that had hitherto refused to speak; he does not believe in the necessary existence of anything mute.
1876
We love neither study nor glory for themselves, but for the pleasures, esteem, and power they provide.
1772
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
True greatness is to let each thing have its real nature; then [...] to appreciate its value, to discern what is best [...], and to commit to it in all circumstances.
c. 108 AD
Marble female figure
4500–4000 BCE
Disorder exists only because of order, lawlessness only because of the law, unreason only because of reason, because the order, law, and reason seen here below are only borrowed.
c. 253-270 AD
Patience is the art of hoping.
1747
The [people] [...] always wanted to have two masters so as to have none at all: a false and unhappy policy that made them change tyrants and misfortunes.
1756
The age of romantic projects having passed, [...] my only remaining hope was to live without constraint, in eternal leisure.
1782-1789
Faience statuette of Aphrodite
334–30 BCE
If [a person] retained no memory of their modifications, each time they would believe they were feeling for the first time: entire years would be lost in each present moment.
1754
He who truly sees honor sees nothing beyond it.
1773
Competition divides the interests of [the workers]. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their master, unites them in a common thought of resistance — combination.
1847
[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
Bronze statuette of an actor
ca. 1st–2nd century CE
In any judicial organization there are secondary flaws that can cause only moderate harm [...], and other principal ones that not only harm it, but destroy it.
1856
He for whom circumstances make [...] incompatible the actions ordered by several strict obligations [...] is wounded in his love of the good.
1943
I believe [...] that God is, as they say, the immanent cause of all things and not the transitive cause.
1661-1676
Adversity [...] is close to a good outcome when it becomes extreme.
1636
Limestone statue of a woman
early 6th century BCE
There is obscurity when you speak of something you have not announced beforehand, and then insert a long aside.
329-323 BC
Most of the bourgeois and business people, not having the means to maintain servants to light their way at night, [...] suffer a very great inconvenience.
1662
It is a disgrace to believe oneself sufficiently enlightened by conjecture and suspicion in the absence of witnesses.
86-82 BC
I praise and admire you; but I pity the fate of Greece, seeing that the only advantages that remained to us, knowledge and eloquence, will, through you, pass over to the Romans as well.
100-120 AD
Terracotta statuette of an actor
late 5th–early 4th century BCE
If, like truth, a lie had only one face, we would be on better terms. [...] But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and an infinite field.
1580
And thus the legislative and executive power come often to be separated.
1690
The great Scipio acquired less glory from his triumphs than when, still young, he defended his father on the banks of the Ticinus [...].
1513-1519
One must choose, in philosophy, between pure reasoning which aims for a definitive result [...] and patient observation which only gives approximate results, capable of being corrected and completed indefinitely.
1919
Engraving
18th century
A suffering proportionate to his misdeed is not inflicted on the one who has violated the law [...]; he is simply condemned to submit to it.
1893
I am this way, without knowing why. I am, like the husk from which a cicada has emerged, [...] an accessory, a thing having no existence of its own.
4th century BC
What did not exist, now exists; one sees what one does not understand, and the only thought that remains is that of the omnipotence of God.
1263-1264
A religion that was clear would soon be finished; our sacred interpreters would have nothing to tell us if God had spoken too clearly.
1768
A Meadow Bordered by Trees
ca. 1845–60
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
One can never respect too much the genius, intelligence, and high manifestations of human sensitivity.
1926
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest people of past centuries.
1637
Others who lack sense [...] pile speech upon speech [...] and lose themselves in endless narrations.
1623
Richard Abell
1724