Nothing prevents a thing which does not have in its nature the reason for another thing, from nevertheless being able to have it from another cause.
1270
Tobacco, the first product to be cultivated in America, but always negligently.
1770
For how many great captains have iron and fire sometimes succeeded less than a cleverly placed witticism?
1636
The idea of a miracle necessarily includes the idea of something rare and extraordinary. [...] [Natural things] are not miracles, because they are common things.
1715-1716
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt
1530
The art of destruction is within the reach of the most limited minds. Nothing prevents a coarse lout from taking a hammer and knocking the nose off every statue [...], after which he can snicker with pleasure at his work.
1926
A free judgment offends the ears of the great.
1574
To sleep is to lose interest. We sleep in the exact measure in which we lose interest.
1919
I am of the opinion that the best thing [...] is for all of us to seek out the best possible teacher together, first for ourselves, for we are in the greatest need of one.
c. 380 BC
Spoon or ligula
670 BCE - 330 CE
Perfect happiness is not on earth, but the greatest of misfortunes, and the one that can always be avoided, is to be unhappy by one's own fault.
1762
Above all, old men are dangerous, in whom the memory of things past remains, while they have lost the memory of their own repetitions.
1580
Ideals are realities.
1922
These minds are excessive in all encounters: they elevate low things, they enlarge small ones, they bring distant ones near. Nothing appears to them as it is.
1674-1675
Bronze statuette of a bearded man
late 6th century BCE
Those [...] who, by the most perfect renunciation of their reason, most fully enter into the spirit of their inconceivable religion...
1766
As for the interests of our house, I have long since abandoned them to destiny, seeing that prudence itself [...] would waste its efforts on them.
1643-1649
[Pain is] light if I can bear it, and fleeting if I cannot.
63-64 AD
He preferred the care of his life to the care of the empire. How much more would he have preferred the care of his life to lesser cares?
4th century BC
Portrait of a Woman, Said to Be Lady Agnes Anne Wrothesley
1791
All that exists is just and unjust, and in both cases equally justifiable.
1872
I have no principle of ascent within me. [...] It is only by directing my thought toward something better than myself that this something pulls me upward. If I am truly pulled, this something is real.
1947
We speak of luxury as if it were something of which we had an absolute idea, yet we only have a relative one.
1776
Nature [...] demands of us not only a commendable use of our activity, but also a noble use of our leisure.
c. 350 BCE
Saint Vincent, Patron Saint of Lisbon
1525
He delighted in the honors and pomps of the world, and valued the praise of men, which threw him into great prodigality.
1518-1527
The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.
1847
Passions can do everything.
1772
'The artist stands before his finished work of art as before an enigma, about which he can fall into the same errors as others'.
1896
Female head, perhaps from a standing tambourine player
ca. 600–480 BCE
The principles and arguments of the sciences penetrate the mind, seize it and master it to such an extent that it remains subjugated [...] and cannot resist conviction.
1609
Everything through our sensations and nothing without them, that is our story.
1817
Who could ever [...] strip himself of his power in favor of another [...] to the point of ceasing to be a man?
1670
This discourse smacks of heresy. My confessor [...] will infer from it that you do not believe in Providence.
1764
John Gray (1731–1811) of Newholm
1776
'To live well is better than to live'. From which one could conclude: Not to live is better than to live badly. [...] and yet the great majority prefer to live very badly than not to live at all.
1819
Every individual has, even now, a deeply rooted conviction that he is a social being, that his feelings and aims should be in harmony with those of his fellow creatures.
1861
As [Plato] philosophized [...] in a place called the Academy, his followers kept the name Academics.
45 BC
Spirits are [...] images of the divinity itself [...], capable of knowing the system of the universe and of imitating something of it [...], each spirit being like a small divinity in its own department.
c. 253-270 AD
Landscape Study with Clouds
ca. 1829–31
All abstraction is but the suppression of certain manifest ideas [...]. One can therefore call abstraction a negative attention, that is, a real action opposed to that by which the representation becomes clear.
1763
Man, be grateful for these gifts, but at the same time, consider what surpasses them still.
c. 108 AD
Notwithstanding this great vogue, the use [of the concept], three or four years after its establishment, was so despised that it was hardly used anymore [...].
1662
I think that nations, like men, almost always indicate, from their youth, the principal features of their destiny.
1835-1840
Limestone statuette of a male votary with Cypriot shorts and a diadem
early 6th century BCE
To attain Knowledge and certainty, it is necessary that we have determined ideas, and to make our Knowledge real, our Ideas must correspond to their Archetypes.
1689
However sublime the definition [...] that a religion may give of the divinity; [...] most believers will seek to attract divine favor less by virtue [...] than by frivolous observances [...], by fanatic ecstasies [...].
1757
No one is more prone to mistakes than those who act only upon reflection.
1747
In all their actions, they carried integrity and justice.
100-120 AD
Portrait of a Woman, Said to Be Marie de Mautesson
ca. 1830