For the one who consents, there is no necessity.
63-64 AD
It is in the city that luxury is born: luxury necessarily produces greed, and greed begets audacity, which is itself the mother of all crimes and all misdeeds.
79 BC
It is by the same act of the mind that Descartes identified geometry, on the one hand with algebra, and on the other with physics.
17th century
Prudence [...] is like the steward of wisdom. It prepares for it [...] the leisure it needs to accomplish its superior work, by containing and moderating the passions.
4th century BC
Portrait of a Man, Possibly an Architect or Geographer
1597
This power cannot legitimately be an absolute and arbitrary power with regard to their lives and their property.
1690
To put duration in space is, by a true contradiction, to place succession within simultaneity itself.
1889
The foundation of all States is a good military, and where it does not exist, there can be neither good laws nor any other good thing.
1855
There is a difference between apposition, mixtion, temperation, and confusion.
c. 253-270 AD
Apple Blossoms
1873
Among the infinite number of problems that present themselves [...], to choose those whose solution is of interest to man is the merit of wisdom.
1766
All laws that prohibit things innocent in themselves generate a new offense.
1797-1798
Others do not so much impress upon things the image of their mind as that of their passions, never losing sight of the interest of their party.
1623
To say that nothing is done without His providence and His inspection is not to debase His work, but rather to make known its greatness and excellence.
1715-1716
Terracotta head of a woman
late 4th–early 3rd century BCE
From the day the nation [...] allowed its kings to establish a general tax without its consent, [...] the seed was sown for almost all vices and almost all abuses.
1856
There are always some, better born than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from shaking it off; who never become accustomed to subjection.
c. 1552-1553
The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man [...] that he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.
1861
Standing in his field of global knowledge, the Sage despises the knowledge of details, all convention, all affection, all art.
4th century BC
Bronze handle of a hydria (water jar)
ca. 460–450 BCE
We only have the ideas that we know how to notice in them. [...] we all see the same objects; but because we do not have the same pleasure, the same interest in observing them, we each have very different ideas of them.
1754
[...] solitude is the best preparation for the study of wisdom and the meditation of divine things.
1263-1264
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
May 1774 - Dec 1775
Content [...] with being a philosopher in reality, he was happy not to appear so, far from being angry about it.
c. 108 AD
Marble statue head of a youth
1st or 2nd century CE
Moral rules are moral only in relation to certain experimental conditions, and therefore, one can understand nothing of the nature of moral phenomena if these conditions are not determined.
1893
Fate may well separate us, but not disunite us.
1761
If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.
c. 375 BC
Having become almost insensitive to the praise and satire of nations, a man can break all the bonds of prejudice and examine with a tranquil eye the contradiction of human opinions.
1758
Grainfields
mid- or late 1660s
Error [...] consists only in a hasty consent of the will, which allows itself to be dazzled by some false glimmer.
1674-1675
Servitude debases men to the point of making itself loved.
1747
Although a happy quickness of mind is a gift of nature, art can nevertheless help and perfect it.
1636
To enjoy and use [the privilege] [...] fully, peacefully, and perpetually.
1662
François Joseph Lefebvre (1755–1820)
1800
Miracles seem to have been invented only to substitute for good reasoning; truth and evidence do not need miracles to be adopted.
1766
The spirit of science is [...] a universal spirit, [...] the nameless spirit, neither Christian nor pagan.
1842-1845
[...] perhaps we are much more inclined than our fathers to licentiousness, and wine and women are two things that, carried to excess, are harmful to one another.
1580
The fear shown by the new ministers in the face of the rebellious masses was such that any means seemed good to them, as long as it served to consolidate the shaken foundations of authority!
1851-1852
Virgin and Child
ca. 1485
For, as we know all too well, a cubic line of desire weighs more than a cubic inch of knowledge.
1840
[...] this ecclesiastical and familiar Latin, with its analytical syntax, is most pleasant to read.
1926
To begin his fortune, [he had] far fewer means [...], and experienced, in order to increase it, much greater obstacles.
100-120 AD
Only that which is just is legitimate. Crime and lies never are.
1940
Filippo Archinto (born about 1500, died 1558), Archbishop of Milan
mid-1550s
What characterizes all literary decadence? The fact that life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign [...], the page comes to life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.
1888
Whatever affection one may feel [...] for others, it is not and cannot be disinterested; [...] the most generous friendship [...] is only a modification of self-love.
1751
For the sole reason that no person perfectly resembles another, we never understand precisely, we are never precisely understood.
1769, published 1830
It is obviously a defect to mock that which is not worthy of mockery.
c. 1660
Madame Jean-Baptiste Nicolet (Anne Antoinette Desmoulins, 1743–1817)
late 1780s