The number and importance of the prohibitions that isolate a sacred thing [...] correspond to the degree of sacredness with which it is invested.
1912
[A defeat] would have left behind it, in the minds of the survivors, a desire for revenge which, in revolutionary times, is one of the strongest incentives for energetic and passionate action.
1851-1852
When the enemy is at one's back, necessity makes one discard everything that leisure [...] had allowed to be gathered.
63-64 AD
Imagining that, to penetrate the secrets of nature, it was enough to meditate with obstinacy, to turn one's mind, so to speak, in every direction, and to keep it in perpetual agitation.
1620
Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh: An Allegory of the Dinteville Family
1537
Why then be indignant, since you have what is best!
c. 108 AD
Vogelfrei means both 'free as a bird' and 'outlaw'.
1882
In our day, the human mind must be kept to theory; it runs of its own accord to practice.
1835-1840
We will do voluntarily, under the auspices of reason, what today we only do in spite of ourselves, by the constraint of laws.
1st Century A.D.
Flora and Zephyr
1743
A child who has never left the paternal home imagines that the feelings and manners of his parents are universal reason.
1674-1675
I do not see [...] why 'disharmony' [...] would provoke a specific manifestation such as laughter, while so many other flaws leave the facial muscles impassive.
1900
Justice is the feeling of a soul in love with order, and which is content with its own.
1746
Gather bachelors of both sexes in a single cloister, and you will not be long in seeing the community of men and women arise.
1770
Mirope Savati Gaye
1865
Our political constitution is an aristocracy, which has the approval of the multitude.
c. 387 BC
Everyone claims to love virtue for its own sake. This phrase is on everyone's lips, and in no one's heart.
1772
The particular will by its nature tends towards preferences, and the general will towards equality.
1762
It is therefore in the decomposition of the proposition into its elements that the separation between the brute and the intelligent species par excellence is marked.
1803
Marble grave relief with a funerary banquet and departing warriors
2nd century BCE
[The soul of the star] cannot therefore be harmful since its principle is an excellent nature.
c. 253-270 AD
An outburst, escaped in certain moments, can put the hero on the same level as the common man; it can even put the latter above the former.
1636
In alteration [...], an intrinsic form is acquired. [...] But in local motion, what is acquired is 'where' (ubi), which names extrinsically.
c. 1270
Think rather that if life flees, if youth is but a flower that soon withers, we must all the more seize the moment when we possess it [...] & not lose any particle of such a fleeting existence.
1742
Standing female figurine
ca. 600–480 BCE
[Merchants] have as much need to sell as we have to buy.
1776
The spirit of science is [...] a universal spirit, [...] the nameless spirit, neither Christian nor pagan.
1842-1845
It is always necessary that, besides the difference of time and place, there be an internal principle of distinction [...]. The specifics of identity and diversity, therefore, do not consist in time and place.
1704
[The legislator] perpetually believes he is ensuring peace and yet he unleashes war; this is because he legislates for the abstract man [...] and such a variety of man does not exist.
1926
Fragment of a statuette of a woman
4th–3rd centuries BCE
Those who know nature do not try to express it in words; and those who try, thereby show that they do not know.
4th century BC
A relative finds a relative, a brother a brother, a wife her husband; each moves away as quickly as possible.
1527
It is with the products of the human race as with those of the earth.
329-323 BC
[Actions committed without intellectual freedom] do not constitute a trait of a man's character: either he acted differently than he intended, or he was incapable of reflecting on what should have deterred him from the act.
1839
Study Head of a Young Woman
ca. 1618–20
Desire is impossible; it destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one [...].
1947
[...] man is born only for joy.
1768
It is universally admitted that partiality is incompatible with justice; preference given to one person over another, when there is no reason to prefer them, is unjust.
1861
April, the perfume of the gods, who, from the heavens, smell the scent of the plain.
1546/1563
Rustic Interior
1632
This movement [...] follows as necessarily from the disposition of the organs alone [...] as does that of a clock from the force, situation, and shape of its counterweights and wheels.
1637
[...] when they [minds] have once acquiesced to false opinions [...], it is just as impossible to speak to them intelligibly as to write legibly on a paper already scribbled over with writing.
1772
One day in the month of October 1654.
1643-1662
[The clement one] seems to have conquered victory itself, by restoring to the vanquished the rights it had acquired over them.
46 BC
Orpheus and Eurydice
1650
[...] this feverish solicitude we have for the chastity of women also means that a good woman [...] means, in effect, nothing other to us than a chaste woman.
1580
Submitting to the laws of a country [...] does not make a man a member of the society established there: it is but a local protection and a local homage [...].
1690
[The idea of God] can neither punish nor reward. This idea of punishments and rewards can only seduce the ignorant.
17th century
Live in conformity with nature, that is, preserve yourself in the perfection of your nature.
1797-1798
Portrait of a Young Boy
1636