Those who have examined things the least are the most obstinate.
1689
He who has modest tastes does not create trouble for himself; he who is concerned only with his inner progress is not affected by any deprivation.
4th century BC
It is these cold and languid minds that are most capable of discovering the most solid and hidden truths; they can listen, in a greater silence of their passions, to the truth that teaches them.
1674-1675
Each substance is like a world apart, independent of every other thing but God; thus all our phenomena [...] are but consequences of our own being.
1686
Spoon probe
3900 BCE - 100 CE
The art that applies to one, applies to many, and reciprocally.
End of the 4th century BC
Unbelief is an accident; faith alone is the permanent state of humanity.
1835-1840
Myths aim to establish genealogical relationships between man and animal [...]. Through this community of origin, they are thought to account for their community of nature.
1912
Do you not prefer to stretch out your neck, as Lateranus did in Rome when Nero ordered his head to be cut off? He stretched it out and was struck; but the blow was too weak: he drew it back for a moment, then stretched it out again.
c. 108 AD
The Two Sisters
1770
Forgetting the past, banishing the worries of the future, let us enjoy the present; in each moment of our existence, let us seize this good, over which fate and fortune cannot exercise their whims.
1742
Is it not [...] to live as if in tents, to regard this life as a pilgrimage and an exile?
1263-1264
The operations which by previous methods are laborious, complex, long, and uncertain, become easy, simple, prompt, and assured.
1642-1645
The doctor ceases to sympathize, [...] much like, at the fourth performance of a tragedy, the spectator ceases to cry.
1773
Statuette of Herakles
3rd century BCE–2nd century CE
My formula for human greatness is amor fati. [...] One must not only bear what is necessary [...] one must also love it...
1888
Luxury, in the primary sense of the word, is the same thing as excess.
1776
For us to taste happiness, nature does not require great preparations; our felicity is in our hands.
41-43 AD
One cannot think enough about how dangerous uprooted people are.
1797-1798
George IV (1762–1830), When Prince of Wales
1773
Art is art only when it is its own end, absolutely free, when it knows no higher laws than its own, the laws of truth and beauty.
1842-1845
What gives character value [according to Kant] is to succeed, without sympathy, cold and indifferent, in doing good out of a disagreeable duty. A theory that revolts the true moral sense. An apotheosis of insensibility.
1840
One cannot be just if one is not humane.
1747
Reality is indomitable; you cannot bend it, you must bend to it. The dream, on the contrary, is an infinitely subtle and malleable material.
1926
Fragment of a limestone relief with two standing figures
4th–3rd century BCE
Anything that breaks social unity is worthless: All institutions that put man in contradiction with himself are worthless.
1762
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation, those who dissent from the opinion even more than those who hold it.
1859
Wherever men are ignorant, there will be prophets, inspired ones, miracle-workers; [...] this trade will always diminish in the same proportion as nations become enlightened.
1766
Whether it is better to be loved than feared.
1855
Man Weighing Gold
ca. 1515–20
Her haughty heart delighted in alarms; and the cockfights of her country had been her cherished pastimes.
ca. 1730
I doubt... that any master sculptor... would have preferred the preservation... of the children nature had given him, to that of his works... brought to perfection.
1580
A hasty prosperity followed by rapid successes is usually suspect and threatens a prompt change.
1636
A people without money, if they are enlightened, is commonly a people without tyrants.
1772
Interior of a Gothic Church at Night
probably ca. 1635–40
He, it is said, is the wisest who knows for himself what ought to be done; the next place belongs to him who knows how to follow the wise counsel of another.
66 BC
So many men, so many boroughs, so many cities, so many nations sometimes endure a single tyrant, who has no power other than that which they give him.
c. 1552-1553
[The revolutionaries] held an intermediate position between the bourgeoisie and the working classes, preventing, by their constant agitation, things from relapsing into the old, everyday tranquility.
1851-1852
It is a matter [...] of establishing degrees of certainty, of supporting the senses [...], but rejecting almost all the product of the first operations of the mind that immediately follow sensations.
1620
The Life and Miracles of Saint Godelieve
1475
Based on the concept of man, [...] morality needs neither the Idea of another Being superior to man for man to know his duty, nor another motive than the law itself for him to fulfill it.
1793
In our eyes, the culmination of mysticism is a contact [...] with the creative effort manifested by life. This effort is of God, if it is not God himself.
1932
There is nothing of a constant nature, and everything is but mingling and separation.
c. 350 B.C.E.
My anguish comes precisely from the fear of doing, in leaving, despite myself and unknowingly, what I would above all not want to do—namely, to flee.
1942
Fragment of a terracotta relief of a woman and child
mid-4th century BCE
What [animals] do better than us does not prove that they have a mind [...]; but rather that they have none, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs.
1637
Lacking [charisma], [a man's] great deeds and virtues became unbearable even to those who reaped their benefits: they could not stand his pride or his stubbornness.
100-120 AD
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
[Mockery] is based on a false opinion, because it is supposed that the one who is mocked is the first cause of his actions.
c. 1660
Marble fragment of an Ionic column capital from the Temple of Artemis at Sardis
ca. 300 BCE–early 2nd century CE