We only enjoy other people; the rest is nothing.
1746
If we were to act in such a way as to show that in our eyes the former inhabitants [...] are but an obstacle [...], the question of life and death would arise between the two races. [The country] would become an enclosed field, [...] where one of them would have to die.
1847
[Evil] consists in privation, that is, in what the efficient cause does not do. This is why the Scholastics used to call the cause of evil deficient.
c. 253-270 AD
Certainly the memory of a pain is very different from the pain itself.
1805
Marble female figure
3200–2700 BCE
One must exhort the living to imitate the virtue of the dead and to console their descendants.
c. 387 BC
There is a word without words... Sometimes there is no need for words...
4th century BC
O God! who has given intelligence to substances that seem so despicable; the infinitely small costs You as little as the infinitely large.
1752
He exercises sovereign rule who reigns over the souls of his subjects.
1670
Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist
ca. 1497
Think [...] of death, of prison, of torture, of exile; but think of them without trembling, submissive to the one who has called you to such a fate.
c. 108 AD
[...] the air we breathe is a mixture of fire, water, earth, and air [...]. This is the common understanding of physicists, who teach that the elements are mixed.
1653-1662
[He was] certainly the most shameless of vicious men, and the most perfect scorner of decency and honesty.
100-120 AD
[His] memoirs on improvement [...] were no longer to be found, [...] perhaps because they were suppressed by clerks with an interest in preventing his projects.
1760-1779
Red Sunset
1905–8
To work intellectually is to guide the same representation through different planes of consciousness [...] from the schema to the image.
1919
Do they not seem to have separated them from all of nature, by ravishing from them at once the sky, the sun, the water, and the earth, so that the monster [...] should no longer enjoy any of the elements which are regarded as the principle of all that exists?
79 BC
The ordinary birth of things is imperfect; they increase and strengthen as they grow.
1580
It is necessary to change with the times if one wishes to always have fortune on one's side.
1855
Statuette of a youth
6th century BCE
The State machine develops day by day in a more monstrous way, becomes day by day more foreign to the population as a whole, more blind, more inhuman.
1934
Reactionary attempts to halt bourgeois development will fail just as surely as the moral enthusiasm and the inflamed proclamations of the democrats.
1850
And he who is a terror to all, must be afraid of all.
c. 41 AD
A man who is imbued with what he says, ordinarily imbues others with it; a passionate person always moves; and although his rhetoric is often irregular, it is nonetheless very persuasive.
1674-1675
Marble table leg (trapezophoros) with reliefs of griffins
5th century BCE
One must leave the state of nature, in which each follows his own judgment, and unite with all others [...] in a common submission to an external, legal, and public constraint.
1797
Objects have no value in themselves; they are worth only the price that our soul attaches to them.
1742
Books and learning give to men, more than anything else, the sense and understanding to know themselves and to hate tyranny.
c. 1552-1553
If we do not all receive the punishment for our sins here below, let us not place our trust in this impunity, for it foretells for us much more terrible punishments in the future life.
1263-1264
Annunciation in an Initial M
ca. 1310–15
We speak of luxury as if it were something of which we had an absolute idea, yet we only have a relative one.
1776
The contradiction of Catholicism with human nature was the intimate foundation of the Reformation.
1842-1845
[...] all the phenomena of bodies can be explained mechanically [...] without bothering to know whether there are souls or not.
1686
The relationships that [restitutive rules] determine [...] are established not between the individual and society, but between restricted and special parts of society, which they link together.
1893
The Missionary's Adventures
ca. 1883
Illusion is a necessary effect of the passions, whose strength is almost always measured by the degree of blindness into which they plunge us.
1758
You will always say: We want; and you will always do what others want.
1762
[Theological quarrels] are very useful to the Church; when one argues about the form, one does not argue about the substance.
1768
As for the pain, I do not take it into account at all; for it is so short.
1643-1649
Man in a Turban
1632
For there is nothing so remote or so contrary that the Mind cannot bring together into a single idea by means of this Faculty.
1689
If [elocution] is diffuse, it will lack clarity; and likewise, if it is too concise.
329-323 BC
To trust in oneself, to become a being of merit and worth, is the best and surest way.
1870
If one has seen clearly the symptoms of decadence, one will also understand the essence of morality—one will understand what is hidden beneath its most sacred names [...]: impoverished life, the will to perish, the great weariness. Morality is the negation of life...
1888
The Crucifixion, (reverse) Saint Francis of Assisi; The Resurrection, (reverse) An Abbot Saint, Possibly Saint Benedict
1455
[Certain thinkers are] more harmful by enervating other geniuses or diverting them from their true course.
1620
Man is found in the heart, not in the head.
1819
Those who show themselves to be slaves of a passion degrade themselves in the eyes of the wise; and those who know how to cover it up escape this discredit.
1636
There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: to find that limit [...] is as indispensable [...] as protection against political despotism.
1859
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
1530