Despair [...] is the greatest of our errors.
1746
How many events it is enough to predict for them to take place.
1623
[The Deluge is a] paternal correction [...] by divine providence, which, for having failed to foresee the malice of men, repented of having made them so malicious, and drowned them once and for all to make them better; which had, as we know, marvelous success.
1768
Do not compound the son's grief with the father's tears, nor the father's sadness with the son's tears.
59 BC
Orpheus and Eurydice
1650
April, the honor of the green, yellow, and blue-green meadows [...].
1546/1563
The pleasure which necessarily precedes the observation of a law [...] is pathological [...]; but that which is necessarily preceded by the law [...] belongs to the moral order.
1797-1798
Oh my Master! [...] You who destroy without being wicked! You who build without being good! You who were before time, and are not old!
4th century BC
He spoke Latin, argued philosophical theses, and revealed the hidden sins of others.
1518-1527
Limestone head of a beardless male votary
1st century BCE
[...] the progress of the moral sciences never precedes and indeed only follows from afar that of the physical and mathematical sciences [...].
1797-1798
There is a kind of contradiction between the two principles of human nature upon which religion is founded. Our natural terrors make us see a wicked deity [...]; our inclination to praise paints it as excellent and all-perfect.
1757
Our character is still us [...].
1889
I have in my soul an idea of God and of nature very different from that which the new Christians are accustomed to defend.
1661-1676
Portrait of a Venetian Senator
ca. 1525
[...] making oneself the sole cherished object of the Supreme Being is a much more powerful pride than that which aspires only to be cherished and admired by present and future men. Christian pride hides itself; it has the appearance of its opposite.
1841
Is the stag inflamed by [physical love]? From timid he becomes brave.
1772
When [a powerful person] causes harm, it is not of small, but of great importance.
329-323 BC
The notion of duration is [...] entirely relative: each person judges it only by the succession of their ideas.
1754
Marble stele (grave marker) of a woman
ca. 375–350 BCE
We hide [...] to build a man, to destroy him we seek broad daylight and vast expanses.
1580
Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
c. 375 BC
All the movements we make without our will contributing to them [...] depend only on the conformation of our members [...] in the same way that the movement of a watch is produced by the sole force of its spring and the shape of its wheels.
1649
Chrysippus taught that mixtion is broader than temperation.
c. 253-270 AD
Marble inscribed base
ca. 2nd century CE
The unity and simplicity of this concept would easily make one forget what a long series of obstacles had to be overcome to achieve it.
1663
The necessary being and the being by its essence are but one and the same thing.
Late 17th - early 18th century
Greek geometry is a prophecy. [...] originally it constituted a symbolic language concerning religious truths.
1962
[The predicament of habitus] is suitable only for humans. It is also true that we dress [...] certain animals with clothing that is foreign to them.
c. 1270
Olivier Journu (1724–1783)
1756
Equality of conditions does not by itself produce regularity of morals; but one cannot doubt that it facilitates and increases it.
1835-1840
Oh! how little one must have had to think, to have been able to read so much!
1905
These are probably the reasons that have made the epithet 'dog' an insult; but we dare not decide.
1764
It would be desirable for important matters to always be treated with the same impartiality and in the same spirit of tolerance.
1773-1774
Marble portrait bust of a boy
ca. 35–50 CE
The feeling of pain is more intense than the feeling of pleasure.
1674-1675
The higher we rise, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
1881
Karl Marx before the Cologne Jury.
1848
Society exists and lives only in and through individuals. Should the idea of society be extinguished in individual minds [...], society will die.
1912
The Huis ten Bosch at The Hague and Its Formal Garden (View from the South)
ca. 1668–70
Nothing can make a man a member of a society but his actual entering into it by positive engagement, and express promise and compact.
1690
Society is the exact image of an arch that would collapse [...] if its solidity were not ensured by the mutual resistance of its stones.
63-64 AD
You must absolutely and completely be in your soul [...] free or a slave, enlightened or ignorant.
c. 108 AD
The art [...] that no one can mark the limits of your capacity will remain [...] fruitless if you do not add to it the art of hiding the affections of your heart.
1636
Portrait of a Man
1781
I knew that base passions seldom subjugate any but weak men, and have little hold on souls of a strong temper [...].
1782-1789
The laws of most countries are far worse than the people who execute them, and many of these laws owe their continued existence only to the rarity of their application.
1869
He placed his glory and his patriotism in preventing, by his presence, [his city] from diminishing further, and in allowing his fellow citizens to enjoy the esteem attached to his name.
100-120 AD
Since men have been making literature [...], they have lost the ability to imagine these pretty things called fairy tales.
1926
Garden of the Painter at Saint Clair
1908