I am afflicted [...] by the misfortune that has befallen me; but I do not repent of what I have said.
100-120 AD
The works of wisdom surpass those of valor in the importance, extent, and duration of their effects.
1620
How could one's mind withstand the persecution of fifty people who busy themselves from the beginning of the day to its end with tormenting you?
1760
The problem of freedom is therefore born of a misunderstanding: it has been for the moderns what the sophisms of the school of Elea were for the ancients.
1889
Limestone statue of a male votary holding a bird in the left hand
ca 500–450 BCE
To attribute the existence and constitution of the universe to chance and fortune is to commit an absurdity and to speak as a man devoid of sense and intelligence.
c. 253-270 AD
The word is also an image, an eminently abstract image; indeed, by pronouncing the name of a thing, one imagines one knows the thing itself.
1841
The mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.
1762
[I remembered] an old project that I hold dear to my heart, that of making the masterpieces of Greek poetry [...] accessible to the popular masses.
1953
Buckle
7000 BCE - 330 CE
As for drugs, whether from Apothecaries or from Empirics, I hold them in such low esteem that I would never dare advise anyone to use them.
1643-1649
Those whom a base inertia [...] chains to their comfort are the cowards left to live out of contempt.
63-64 AD
In the course of the development of large-scale industry, [working] time increasingly becomes the measure of the value of commodities, which is to say, also the measure of wages.
1849
April, the perfume of the gods, who, from the heavens, smell the scent of the plain.
1546/1563
Peasant Family in a Barn
1640s
One of his flatterers, named Damocles [...] believed himself the most fortunate of men, when all of a sudden he perceived above his head a naked sword [...] attached to the ceiling by a single horsehair.
45 BC
The public will look for [the author] in an edition, not his commentators.
1855
If agriculture were to fall in the agricultural provinces [...], the merchant provinces that caused their ruin would ruin themselves in turn.
1776
It is because [the true Li] always follows very simple Laws [...] that storms form and ravage the harvests [...]. It is the same conduct that produces such different effects.
1707
Woman Standing Beside a Balustrade with a Poodle
ca. 1895
Everything is but contradiction, and men are so diverse that one can only know them one by one. The science of man is chimerical [...].
1926
The Christian Religion is [...] the support of Society [...]. This is why [...] the Church has spies and forces parents, friends, and servants to inform on each other; which makes [...] the intercourse of life infinitely agreeable.
1768
The true cause is one thing... and that which is only a condition, without which the cause could not be a cause, is another.
1686
Beneath the multiple [...] distinctions, beneath the incessant [...] transformations, [...] lies a hidden law, [...] nature.
4th century BC
Terracotta male head
5th century BCE
What tears a man from sleep and forces him to write? [...] Nature, the strongest thing in him, pulling him where it wills, despite his resistance.
c. 108 AD
All known religions have been [...] systems of ideas that tended to embrace the universality of things and to give us a total representation of the world.
1912
Pettiness [...] consists in not knowing how to spend on a large scale when it is suitable.
4th century BC
Pure reason is placed in such an isolated sphere [...] that one cannot touch one of its parts without touching all the others, nor do anything without having first assigned to each its place and its influence on another.
1783
Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh: An Allegory of the Dinteville Family
1537
Every movement performed is always exactly represented by the quantity of extension traversed, for it is the same fact considered in two ways.
1817
If, indeed, there were an infinite body, [...] this body would not be in 'where' (ubi).
c. 1270
Are you not ashamed, he said to him, to sing so well?
1580
Society [...] practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since [...] it penetrates much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaves the soul itself.
1859
Bronze horse bit
8th–7th century BCE
Education makes good men, and good men do noble deeds.
c. 387 BC
I am somewhat reluctant to [write to you], for fear that [...] this admirable agreement, which was between us and so dear to me, may begin to be contradicted.
1643-1662
Envy [...] forbids admiring a contemporary [...]. To humiliate the living, what praise is lavished on the dead!
1772
No one wants to be pitied for their mistakes.
1747
Marble head of a woman wearing diadem and veil
425–400 BCE
Love [...] is of all feelings the most selfish, and consequently, when wounded, the least generous.
1888
The poor man is not free; he serves in every country.
1769
Immense treasures [...] have dissipated and vanished, but fame has collected and preserved the witty words they have spoken.
1636
As soon as the mind wants to go beyond the ideas of sensation and reflection to penetrate their causes, this inquiry only serves to make us feel how short our lights are.
1689
Marble head of Herakles
1st or 2nd century CE
Indiscretion or gallantry = adultery.
1830-1831
The European race has received from heaven or acquired through its efforts such an indisputable superiority over all other races [...] that the man placed among us [...] at the lowest rung of the social ladder, is still the first among the savages.
1864-1866
Everything is an enigma and a mystery: doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment, these are the only results of our most exact inquiries.
1757
You establish, it seems to me, a fatal necessity for all actions and all things.
1661-1676
Painted limestone funerary slab with a soldier taking a kantharos from his attendant
2nd half of 3rd century BCE