The principle which determines the development of [the mind's] faculties is simple; Sensations themselves contain it.
1754
While the worker increasingly brings his intelligence to bear on the study of a single detail, the master surveys a broader whole each day...
1835-1840
The concept is as different from the word to which it is attached as it is from the intuition from which it arose. It is of a completely different nature than these sense impressions.
1819
A protector may refuse to help [a people] as an ally, but will soon defend them as a subject.
1513-1519
Bronze left leg and foot
1st or 2nd century CE
He who has modest tastes does not create trouble for himself; he who is concerned only with his inner progress is not affected by any deprivation.
4th century BC
Often, by wanting to keep everything, one loses everything, and by being unwilling to part with false customs [...] one gives enemies the opportunity to shake the good [...] traditions.
c. 1552-1553
Kings are not those who sit on thrones, but those who know how to govern.
1870
Do all souls form a single soul?
c. 253-270 AD
Portrait of a Woman
1838
The first truths [...] are propositions so clear that they can be neither proven nor refuted by propositions that are more so.
1805
What tragedy has another starting point? What is Euripides' Atreus? A way of seeing. What is Sophocles' Oedipus? A way of seeing.
c. 108 AD
Properly speaking, magnificence exists only within the limits we have stated.
4th century BC
The art of pleasing is the art of deceiving.
1747
Limestone statue of a male votary holding a bird in the left hand
ca 500–450 BCE
The universe consents to obey God; in other words, it obeys out of love.
1962
[...] the true general is not the one who is appointed, but the one who has the most beneficial thoughts for [the people].
100-120 AD
Matter, for us, is a set of 'images'. [...] an existence situated halfway between the 'thing' and the 'representation'.
1896
The knowledge of God's existence should not prevent us from being assured of our free will, because we experience and feel it within ourselves.
1643-1649
Madame la Comtesse de Boufflers and Thérèse
mid-1760s
I conceive of two kinds of inequality in the human species: one, natural or physical, [...] the other, moral or political, because it depends on a kind of convention and is established [...] by the consent of men.
1755
If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.
c. 375 BC
The wife who does not push her husband forward holds him back.
1869
The severe word of Kant is a manifesto in which Morality announces that it is free and independent of any kind of revelation, of any kind of God above or below [...].
1841
Fragment of a limestone funerary stele with a disk and a crescent
2nd half of the 6th century BCE
Diogenes of Babylon [...] was the master of Antipater, who was that of Panaetius. Panaetius was that of Posidonius, and the latter that of Cicero.
45 BC
The way of the Creator's continual assistance [...] is to bring in a Deus ex machina in a natural and ordinary matter.
1696
Education must be essentially a matter of authority. [...] Nothing is as false and deceptive as the conception [...] according to which man can be formed through play and with no other stimulus than the attraction of pleasure.
1922
To observe and scrutinize the movements of centuries, the characters of personages, the vacillations in counsels, the subterranean conduits of actions [...].
1623
Marble portrait of the emperor Caracalla
212–217 CE
If patricians were to elect their colleagues [...], without passion and solely for the public interest, no government could be compared to an aristocratic one.
1677
[The predicament of habitus] is suitable only for humans. It is also true that we dress [...] certain animals with clothing that is foreign to them.
c. 1270
Why not stay [...]? Because I am a fool.
1741-1784
It may happen that not everything a man regards as true is so (for he may be mistaken); but he must be truthful in everything he says (he must not deceive).
1796
Study for "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"
1884
[These societies] knew that the overthrow of an established government was but a passing stage in the great impending struggle, and their purpose was to prepare [...] the party [...] for the final, decisive battle which must one day or another put an end to the domination [...] of capital over labor.
1851-1852
A great heart, far from being puffed up by the most astonishing successes, constantly sighs for more.
1636
Children, being by nature as free as their father, [...] may, while in that freedom, choose what society they please.
1690
How could a river not find its way to the sea at last?
1883-1885
Raising the Wind
1812
Thus, revelation itself will prove the authority of revelation.
1766
Fine manners [...] are more arbitrary and accidental things, but the merit of mature age is almost the same in every country; it consists above all in integrity, humanity, knowledge...
1751
Error [...] consists only in a hasty consent of the will, which allows itself to be dazzled by some false glimmer.
1674-1675
One only acquires in order to spend.
1772
Terracotta head of a youth
4th century BCE
Honest Love has gone to his mother's house, from where he rarely descends to this world.
1714
He [man] could enjoy some peace if he had only reason without passions, or if he had only passions without reason.
1670
All are lost through ignorance of the truth: they imagine they are flying towards happiness, deceived as they are by empty rumors [...].
63-64 AD
[...] always the present opinion, the last to arrive, is the true, the infallible one.
1580
Two marble portrait heads from a relief
ca. 13 BCE–5 CE