An image remains essentially an image everywhere, whether sculpted and painted, or simply imaginative [...] and in adoring the god it represents, one cannot help but adore it at the same time.
1841
The critic who has produced nothing is a coward. [...] A critic is a spiritual director, or nothing at all.
1926
One will thus be better able to judge the direction that we would like to try to give to sociological studies.
1895
Simplicity that limits itself to the necessary is a great good, because it removes both the desire for and the worry about the superfluous.
100-120 AD
Hinge
3900 BCE - 100 CE
The body and its actions [...] cannot bring any modification to the soul, except to present themselves to it as objects.
c. 1660
Those who are capable of inventing are rare; those who do not invent are in greater number, and, consequently, the stronger [...].
1746
Today, religion has taken the place of philosophy; it keeps an eye on all our conduct: it has the right to regulate our actions, our words, even our thoughts and our inclinations.
1751
Above all these gods reigns the God par excellence, the absolute Good, principle of all that is divine, source of the divinity of the other gods.
c. 253-270 AD
Upper right corner of a marble sarcophagus: head of a Black African and a maenad
1st quarter of the 3rd century CE
Is it not better to break with fortune at the right time, than to be struck by an unforeseen blow that throws one from the top of the wheel?
1636
Truly beautiful works of art offer the example of wholes in which independent factors converge, in a way impossible to understand, to constitute a unique beauty.
1943
whenever a proposition is inconceivable, one must suspend judgment [...], but examine its contrary; and if one finds the contrary to be manifestly false, one can boldly affirm the first, however incomprehensible it may be.
circa 1658
If there exists among men enamored with virtue anyone who has lived with a more useful man than Socrates, I regard him as the most fortunate of men.
4th century BC
Panthers of Bacchus Eating Grapes
ca. 1719–20
The laws of most countries are far worse than the people who execute them, and many of these laws owe their continued existence only to the rarity of their application.
1869
It is clear that there is a great difference between sensation and thought.
1270
[The stranger] finds a brass vessel [...] there he places the money he owes for his passage. [...] if [the gatekeeper] is not satisfied, he leaves him there to soak until the next day.
1774
[...] men, in seeking to shield themselves from fear, immediately begin to make themselves feared.
1513-1519
Bronze axe head
ca. 2500–1900 BCE
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.
1886
When [a people] wanted to have a king [...], it was declared to them on behalf of God, that it was God himself whom they were rejecting.
1764
That which particularly afflicts common men, should serve as a consolation [to a stronger mind].
1643-1649
Truth is only perceived and generated in the fermentation of contrary opinions.
1758
Marble portrait bust of a boy
ca. 35–50 CE
Habits that in some respects conspire together, harm each other in other respects. [...] they fight each other mutually, and this is the source of the contradictions we sometimes experience.
1755
By dint of being perfect, [a society of true Christians] would lack cohesion; its destructive vice would lie in its very perfection.
1762
When a certain number of people have agreed [...] to form a community [...], they make up a single political body, in which the majority has the right to decide and to act.
1690
For [a great man], life is not this fleeting moment [...]; life is that existence which will be perpetuated by the memory of all centuries.
46 BC
Eye Miniature
1800
Those who [...] attempt the most hazardous expeditions are the brave and the elite of the camp.
63-64 AD
You suspected that my explanation would be opposed to the very different idea we have of the mind and the body; but [...] no one has better established their independence.
1696
However purely accidental the course of things may seem, it is fundamentally anything but, and one should rather admit that all these chances themselves [...] are part of a deeply hidden necessity [...].
1836
A judgment is never false in itself and taken in isolation; [...] it is so only in relation to preceding judgments.
1805
Marble bust of a youth
ca. 140 CE
Through the disorder and the charming negligence of a brush that lets itself go, one easily recognizes the sure and skillful hand of a great painter.
1762
April, the honor of the green, yellow, and blue-green meadows [...].
1546/1563
If one were to use such expressions indiscriminately, there would be either a riddle or a barbarism [...].
c. 335 BC
There is no perception that is not imbued with memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand and one details of our past experience.
1896
Madame Jean-Baptiste Nicolet (Anne Antoinette Desmoulins, 1743–1817)
late 1780s
In [the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher] his idea of modern socialism is already found.
March 17, 1883
One cannot see a multitude of particular facts separately without finally discovering the common bond that unites them.
1835-1840
In the past, the ancients served in times of order, and withdrew in times of disorder. [...] It is better to withdraw to remain pure, than to be soiled by contact with usurpers.
4th century BC
Why add from the outside that this is an evil? Why this lie?
c. 108 AD
In the Studio
1888
one must never give full consent except to propositions that appear so evidently true that one cannot refuse it to them without feeling an inner pain and secret reproaches from reason [...].
1674-1675
There is [...] a very great difference between teaching and persuading; the sign of persuasion is dispute; the sign of teaching is, no dispute.
1772
If a minister of nature [...] takes pains to do it a kind of violence [...], then matter [...] turns in every direction to escape, undergoing the strangest metamorphoses.
1620
I confess wholeheartedly that it is to the warning given by David Hume that I owe my emergence [...] from dogmatic slumber, and the completely new direction given to my research [...].
1783
Halt of Caravans at the Wells of Saba (Beersheba) in the Desert South of Hebron
1850