The terms sociable, good-natured, humane [...] exist in all languages, and universally express the highest merit which human nature is capable of attaining.
1751
On the role that money plays [...]
1864-1866
Ronsard and Baïf praised him.
c. 1552-1553
This ease and slack facility of making everything bow before you is the enemy of all kinds of pleasure. That is to glide, not to walk; it is to sleep, not to live.
1580
Lead figure of a woman
late 7th–early 6th century BCE
Have you thoroughly examined any of their thoughts, and have you formed your own conviction on the matter?
c. 108 AD
Just as cantharides attach themselves [...] to full-blown roses, so the envious person attacks above all the most irreproachable [...].
c. 72-126 AD
From generation to generation, lands [...] are divided among the children, [...] they will often be divided to the point that the different portions will no longer suffice for the subsistence of those to whom they have fallen.
1776
Where there are many well-to-do fortunes, there are far fewer revolutionary movements and dissensions.
c. 350 BCE
Element
7000 BCE - 330 CE
Through his abdication, Charles V in turn rose above fortune.
1636
One can only think and write while sitting.
1888
I see everywhere men, more cunning and more educated than the common folk, deceiving them with illusions [...] that they believe to be supernatural, because they are ignorant of the secrets of nature and the resources of art.
1766
There are [...] men whose function is precisely to see and to make us see what, naturally, we would not perceive. They are the artists.
1934
Terracotta statuette of a woman
3rd century BCE
Invention is the sole proof of genius.
1746
Judgment [...] is the right determination of reason in the things to which judgment relates.
c. 1270
If it does not happen, it will at least be said that it happened, and that amounts to absolutely the same thing for posterity.
1765
The mystery of Christ or of the personal God.
1841
Bronze statuette of an actor
ca. 1st–2nd century CE
The soul can only see and feel in general through the medium of a body: for, when it is completely separated from the body, it lives in the intelligible world.
c. 253-270 AD
The moral principle that telling the truth is a duty, if taken in an absolute and isolated way, would make all society impossible.
1797
The pleasure produced by that rough magnificence [...] which nature puts into all her works is infinitely superior to the pleasure that results from the justness of proportions.
1758
Supreme goodness [...] consists in not loving. [...] Supreme goodness is abstract, global, undifferentiated benevolence, which is not contrary to concrete benevolence [...].
4th century BC
Madonna and Child with Two Angels
1464
What the faithful truly gives to his god is not the food he places on the altar, nor the blood he lets flow from his veins: it is his thought.
1912
There are only passions without truth, truth without passion, heroes without heroic deeds, history without events.
1851/1852
If one begins a war when one wishes, one does not end it in the same way: consequently, a prince, before throwing himself into the hazards of an enterprise, must long measure his forces.
1513-1519
Equivocation = salaciousness.
1830-1831
Bronze crab
3rd–1st century BCE
Though Man may often fall into Error, he can acknowledge no other guide than Reason, nor blindly submit to the will and decisions of others.
1689
[...] old age upon which all infirmities converge, and that without any relief.
4th century BC
I laugh at those debased peoples who [...] dare to speak of liberty without even having the idea of it, and, with hearts full of all the vices of slaves, imagine that to be free it is enough to be mutinous.
1771-1772
The essential knowledge concerning God is that God is the Good. Everything else is secondary.
1962
Bronze statuette of Tyche/Fortuna
ca. 1st century BCE–1st century CE
The extension of bodies [...] has an inestimable advantage: it is extremely divisible and invariable. [...] This is what makes it eminently measurable.
1817
The first [precept] was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such.
1637
The man who holds his livelihood from your benefactions no longer has courage and dares nothing great or bold.
1774
The Scripture [...] speaks a human language and adapts itself to the opinions of the common people; for its object is not to teach philosophy [...].
1661-1676
Girl in a Sailor's Blouse
1918
We know that the bad tendencies of human nature are kept within their limits only when they are not allowed to run free.
1869
There is not one of us who exposes himself with noble devotion to the dangers of public life without the hope of living gloriously in posterity.
63 BC
Space and time are quantities; which cannot be said of situation and order.
1715-1716
The more love is distinguished from function, the more nobility it contains.
1926
The Afternoon Meal (La Merienda)
ca. 1772
Wherever I stop, I resume the thread of my thoughts; and I occupy my mind with some wholesome reflection.
63-64 AD
These minds are excessive in all encounters: they elevate low things, they enlarge small ones, they bring distant ones near. Nothing appears to them as it is.
1674-1675
[...] the charity you owe to your kin should make you desire that they yield to reason, but in all things, and not simply in what concerns us; otherwise, it would be an effect of cupidity and not of charity.
1643-1662
[One must discover] the true motives hidden under pretexts, the secrets of state.
1623
Marble fragment of an Ionic column capital from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis
ca. 300 BCE–early 2nd century CE