Men who live in comfort [...] set an immense price upon their property. As they are still very close to poverty, they see its rigors up close, and they dread them.
1835-1840
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood [...] by the masses.
c. 375 BC
This doctrine [...] of the necessary revolution which carries souls out of the world and brings them back again is an error.
c. 253-270 AD
To wish to take away [authority over sacred matters] from the sovereign is to wish to bring division into the State.
1670
Head and neck from a marble figure
2700–2500 BCE
The multitude believes more in persons than in things, and [...] is more persuaded by the authority of the speaker than by the reasons he gives.
c. 1552-1553
The essential limitation of concepts is [...] that all things, as objects of experience only, are necessarily subject to [these] concepts.
1783
The ultimate goal of any love affair [...] is, in reality, superior to all other goals of human life [...]. For it is nothing less than the composition of the future generation that is decided there.
1819
One does not see in free nations the same distinction of ranks [...] as among other peoples; here the lowliest have I know not what of the lordly in their manner.
1774
Stucco relief panel
2nd half of 1st century CE
The mystery of faith.
1841
While the imitation of the ancients was to become the great literary rule, Saint-Amant frankly admitted that he knew little Latin and even less Greek [...].
1926
The most useful principle of morality [...] is that every crime is a certain cause of suffering for the one who commits it.
1797-1798
In proportion to a man's lack of confidence in his own solitary judgment, he bestows more implicit faith in the infallibility of 'the world' in general.
1859
Bronze tweezers
1st–2nd century CE
Truths that are pernicious to society, if there are any of this kind, must give way to good and salutary errors.
1751
[...] the strength or facility to act that all creatures find in their operations being in this sense only the effective will of the Creator.
1674-1675
In what would our selflessness consist if we were not of that sentiment? It would then be nothing but talk and posturing to make ourselves esteemed by the world.
1643-1662
Translation can hardly be said except of objects that move involuntarily from one place to another, as happens with inanimate things.
End of the 4th century BC
Axehead
ca. 3200–2000 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
To have a great deal of common sense, one must be made in such a way that reason dominates feeling, and experience dominates reasoning.
1746
[This book] contains nothing [...] but my assertions put in a bad order and without their true proofs, so that they appear paradoxical.
1643-1649
A king is nothing [...] where someone can command in his empire in the name of a being recognized as the king's master.
1774
Interior of a Kitchen
ca. 1642–44
Art saves him, and through art — life wins him back.
1872
The greater part of the moral law is too sublime for the natural light to rise so high.
1623
Nothing can make a man a member of a society but his actual entering into it by positive engagement, and express promise and compact.
1690
We will command attention by promising to speak of important, new, extraordinary things, or of facts that concern the State or the audience itself.
86-82 BC
Filippo Archinto (born about 1500, died 1558), Archbishop of Milan
mid-1550s
Before philosophizing, one must live; and life requires that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right nor to the left, but straight ahead.
1934
Let my root grow [...] and in this way the fruit will force its way into being, even if I did not wish it.
c. 108 AD
But that the story of this universal flood is found on a page of a book written in a desert by fugitives [...] this is what petrifies me; I cannot get over it.
1764
From that moment, Priests are the true masters; Kings are but their officers.
1762
Head and neck from a marble figure
2700–2500 BCE
Fear lulls sedition to sleep.
100-120 AD
Often the wisest advice [...] comes to nothing for lack of courage when it comes to execution.
1636
The desires of nature have their limits; those which deceptive opinion gives birth to have no place to stop.
63-64 AD
Does [the theologian] insult the passions? It is the pendulum mocking its spring, and the effect disowning its cause.
1772
Statuette of a man ?
3rd–1st century BCE
By what fatality do the scriptures, revealed by the divinity itself, still need commentaries [...]?
1766
It is philosophy that you must serve, so that true freedom may be yours. He who has submitted and given himself to it does not have to wait; he is emancipated at once. For serving philosophy is itself freedom.
1841
The fullness of love for one's neighbor is simply to be able to ask them: 'What is your torment?'
1942
It would be [...] glorious for any citizen to publicly expose a candidate's flaws, so that the people [...] could form a sounder judgment.
1513-1519
Saint Agapitus of Praeneste in the Arena; (interior) The Beheading of Saint Agapitus of Praeneste
ca. 1500–1505
These abstract questions require leisure.
1686
[...] solitude is the best preparation for the study of wisdom and the meditation of divine things.
1263-1264
We cannot develop with the necessary intensity the faculties our function specifically implies without letting the others grow numb from inaction, thus abdicating [...] a whole part of our nature.
1922
His life is spent standing guard over these useless heaps, in worry and in fear. [...] Is this not true misery? And those who suffer it do not feel it.
4th century BC
The Dispatch-Bearer
?1879