They usually stop at the surface, at external ceremonies [...], they occupy themselves with them entirely. [...] Everything is essential to them, except what is truly essential.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche (6 August 1638 – 13 October 1715) was a French Oratorian priest and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world.
Those who imagine things strongly, express them with great force, and persuade all those who are convinced more by the air and by the sensible impression than by the force of reasons.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
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
Source: The Search After Truth
The disorders of imagination are extremely contagious, and [...] spread among most minds with great ease.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
A man who has never left his country usually imagines that the morals and customs of foreigners are contrary to reason because they are contrary to the custom of his own city [...].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
There are men who judge what is unseen by what is seen; the greatness [...] of the mind [...] by the nobility, dignities, and riches [...]. One is often measured by the other.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
If the prince's religion becomes the religion of his subjects, the prince's reason will also become the reason of his subjects; and thus the prince's sentiments will always be in fashion.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It takes but a word, a gesture from them [princes] [...] to make science [...] pass for low pedantry; recklessness [...] for greatness of courage; and impiety [...] for strength and freedom of mind.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Wherever there are men sensitive to passions, and where imagination is master of reason, there is strangeness, and an incomprehensible strangeness.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One can say foolish things gravely and modestly, and impieties in a devout manner [...]. One must never be persuaded by manners [...], but only by the force of their reasons.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
[The words of certain authors], as dead as they are, have more vigor than the reason of some people. They enter, [...] they dominate the soul in such an imperious way that they make themselves obeyed without being understood.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One must clearly distinguish the force and beauty of words from the force and evidence of reasons.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The conviction of certainty [...] is a sure testimony of madness and extreme uncertainty.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
We are bound to our body, our parents, our friends, our prince, our homeland, by ties that we cannot break.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
There is nothing so unjust as the complaints of those who want to know everything and want to apply themselves to nothing. They [...] want to be moved always, and for their senses and passions to be incessantly flattered.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Man is extremely subject to error; the illusions of his senses, the visions of his imagination, and the abstractions of his mind deceive him at every moment.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The inclinations of the will and the passions of the heart [...] almost always hide the truth, and only let it appear tinged with false, flattering colors.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
For a time, one must despise all plausible opinions; [...] not dwell on the strongest conjectures; [...] neglect the authority of all philosophers.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The knowledge of all the opinions and judgments of other men [...] is not so much a science as a history.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One must never give full consent except to propositions that appear so evidently true that one cannot refuse it without feeling an inner pain and secret reproaches from reason.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Whenever one consents to likelihoods, one puts oneself in danger of being mistaken, and indeed is almost always mistaken.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Error [...] consists only in a hasty consent of the will, which allows itself to be dazzled by some false glimmer.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
We consider the abstract ideas of the pure understanding only with disgust and without much application.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
We cannot increase our union with sensible things without diminishing the one we have with intelligible truths.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Vanity [...] stirs us much more than the love of truth.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Laziness is almost always victorious over the love of truth.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One must always begin with the simplest and easiest things, and dwell on them for a long time before undertaking the search for more complex ones.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
There is nothing so beautiful as truth: one must not pretend to be able to make it more beautiful by painting it with sensible colors.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
There would not be so many false inventions and so many imaginary discoveries, if men did not let themselves be dazed by ardent desires to appear as inventors.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The clearest and simplest principles are the most fruitful, and difficult [...] things are not always as useful as our vain curiosity leads us to believe.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The solidity and consistency that comes with age in the fibers of men's brains creates the solidity and consistency of their errors [...]. It is the seal that fastens their prejudices.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Men reason about things only in relation to the ideas that are most familiar to them.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The consistency of the brain's fibers has [...] a very bad effect, especially in older people, which is to make them incapable of meditation.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is most advantageous to practice meditating on all sorts of subjects in order to acquire a certain facility for thinking about what one wants.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The vanity of their erudition, leading them to judge before they understand, causes them to fall into gross errors of which other men are not capable.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
There is undoubtedly infinitely more pleasure and more honor in being guided by one's own eyes than by those of others.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Men, however, always use their eyes to guide themselves, and they almost never use their minds to discover the truth.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
We must respect antiquity, they say. [...] We fail to consider that Aristotle, Plato, and Epicurus were men like us [...] and that in our time, the world is older [...] and ought to be more enlightened.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Reason demands [...] that we judge them [the ancients] more ignorant than the new philosophers, since, in our time, the world is two thousand years older and has more experience.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Even the passion we have for truth sometimes deceives us when it is too ardent; but the desire to appear learned is what most prevents us from acquiring true knowledge.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The last and most dangerous error into which many people of study fall is to claim that nothing can be known.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Strong imaginations are extremely contagious; they dominate the weak ones; they gradually give them their same turns of thought and imprint their same characters upon them.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
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
Source: The Search After Truth
Sharp minds are those who notice by reason the slightest differences in things [...]. But weak minds have only a false delicacy; they are neither quick nor piercing.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The goal of most commentators is not to clarify their authors and seek the truth; it is to show off their erudition and blindly defend the very flaws of those they comment upon.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
A man who is imbued with what he says, usually imbues others with it; a passionate person always moves people.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Disorders of the imagination are extremely contagious, and [...] slip and spread into most minds with great ease.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
A man who has never left his country usually imagines that the morals and customs of foreigners are [...] contrary to reason because they are contrary to the custom of his own city.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
A child who has never left the paternal home imagines that the feelings and manners of his parents are universal reason.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The great naturally know all things; they are always right, even when they decide on questions of which they have no knowledge.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is not knowing how to live to examine what they [the great] put forward: it is to lose respect to doubt it.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
If the prince's religion becomes the religion of his subjects, the prince's reason will also become the reason of his subjects.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Wherever there are men sensitive to passions, and where imagination is the master of reason, there is strangeness, and an incomprehensible strangeness.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One wants to believe, but does not know what to believe; for when one wants to know what one wants to believe [...] these phantoms [...] often go up in smoke.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One must clearly distinguish the strength and beauty of words from the strength and evidence of reasons.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
[The orator] is like those who dance, who always finish where they began.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Madmen do not pass for what they are among the mad who resemble them, but only among reasonable men.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is an effrontery or rather a kind of madness to praise oneself at every moment [...]. It is also to offend reason.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One must be very full of oneself to imagine [...] that the world would want to read a rather large book to gain some knowledge of our moods.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
We live by opinion, [...] we esteem and [...] love whatever is loved and esteemed in the world, despite the remorse of our conscience.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
we have no clear idea of our soul.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
It is evident that one cannot distinctly know the changes of which a being is capable, when one does not distinctly know the nature of that being.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
what way is there to clearly explain the dispositions that the soul's operations leave within it, [...] since we do not even clearly know the nature of the soul?
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
God's will being entirely in conformity with order and justice, it is enough to have a right to a thing in order to obtain it.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
order demanding that minds which have often thought of some object think of it again more easily, and have a clearer and more vivid idea of it than those who have thought little of it[...]
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
[...] memory [...] would not consist in a facility to operate resulting from certain modifications of their being, but in an immutable order of God[...]
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
[...] all the power of the mind would depend immediately and solely on God alone[...]
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
[...] the strength or facility to act that all creatures find in their operations being in this sense only the effective will of the Creator.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
Although God does everything that is real and positive in the actions of sinners, [...] God is not the author of sin.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
I believe, and I think I must believe, that after the action of the soul there remain in its substance certain changes that actually dispose it to that same action.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
But, as I do not know them, I cannot explain them, for I have no clear idea of my own mind[...]
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
I have no clear idea of my mind, in which I could discover all the modifications of which it is capable.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
[...] the paths through which the spirits flow are smoother and more united by the habit of practice[...]
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth/Elucidations
Our passions not only disguise their main object from us, but also all the things that have some relation to it.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
What is true in Spain is false in France; what is true in Paris is false in Rome; what is certain among the Jacobins is uncertain among the Cordeliers [...].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Men are indifferent regarding the stability of the earth [...] but they are not at all indifferent to these opinions when they are upheld by those they hate.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
We should not be surprised, then, if men carry their hatred or their love so far, and if they perform such bizarre and surprising actions.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The mind [...] is ordinarily capable of recognizing and feeling all the parts of its soul only when others touch upon them and make it feel them.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One would often be mistaken if one always judged what others must feel by what one feels oneself.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Pleasure is doubtless sweet and agreeable to all men; but not all men find pleasure in the same things.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Pride, ignorance, and blindness always go together.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
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
Source: The Search After Truth
Therefore, one must not believe men because men have spoken, for every man is a deceiver.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
When one compares virtue to riches with the clear sight of the mind, one prefers virtue; but when one uses one's imagination [...] one undoubtedly prefers riches to virtue.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One cannot suffer admiration for antiquity to become the master of reason, and for it to be, as it were, forbidden to use one's mind to examine the sentiments of the ancients.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Of all the passions, the one that goes least to the heart is admiration.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Passions always try to justify themselves, and they persuade us insensibly that we are right to follow them.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
All passions justify themselves: they constantly represent to the soul the object that stirs it, in the manner most suited to preserve and increase its agitation.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Most men seem incapable of concluding anything from the first principle of morality.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It was necessary for eternal wisdom to finally make itself perceptible to instruct men who question only their senses.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The multiplicity and diversity of sensory goods are the reason we recognize their vanity less, and are always in the hope of finding the true good we desire within them.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is a common notion to every man who uses his reason rather than his senses, that nothing can be annihilated by the ordinary forces of nature.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
There is no law in nature for the annihilation of any being, because nothingness has nothing beautiful or good, and the author of nature loves his work.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is not a flaw in a limited mind to not know certain things; it is only a flaw to judge them. Ignorance is a necessary evil, but one can and must avoid error.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is infinitely better to anxiously seek the truth and happiness one does not possess, than to remain in a false rest, content with lies and false goods.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
When one has found the truth, one must stand firm in it; since curiosity is given to us only to lead us to discover it.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One often finds minds of two very different tempers: some always want to believe blindly, others always want to see with evidence.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is a contemptible lightness and baseness of mind to believe blindly in the authority of men on subjects that depend on reason.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Only truth and evidence can stop the agitation of the mind [...]. Lies and error can only divide and agitate [minds].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Virtue would not go far, if vanity did not keep it company.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is good that several people apply themselves to anatomy, since it is extremely useful to know it, and the knowledge to which we should aspire is that which is most useful to us.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The best way to defend the truth [...] is not to argue, for in the end it is better [...] to leave [false scholars] in their errors than to attract their aversion.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Just as there is nothing sweeter [...] than to entertain our reasons and approve of our opinions, there is also nothing so shocking as to see that they are not understood.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
desire for a mere trifle, or for something manifestly harmful [...], ceaselessly justifies itself against reason, since so many passions work towards its justification.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
passions act upon the imagination, and the corrupted imagination strives against reason [...].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The feeling of pain is more intense than the feeling of pleasure.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Insults and disgrace are much more deeply felt than praise and applause [...].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
When false zeal joins with hatred, it shields it from the reproaches of reason, and justifies it in such a way that one would feel scruples not to follow its movements.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is the 'I know not what' that stirs us, for reason has no part in it.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The knowledge of all the opinions [...] of other men [...] is not so much a science as a history.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
one must never give full consent except to propositions that appear so evidently true that one cannot refuse it to them without feeling an inner pain and secret reproaches from reason [...].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Whenever one consents to likelihoods, one certainly puts oneself in danger of being mistaken, and is indeed almost always mistaken [...].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Vanity, for example, stirs us much more than the love of truth [...].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
There is nothing so beautiful as truth: one must not claim to make it more beautiful by embellishing it with a few perceptible colors [...].
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Nature is not abstract: the levers and wheels of mechanics are not mathematical lines and circles.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The soul of man is, so to speak, a determined quantity or a portion of thought that has limits it cannot exceed.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Truth is nothing other than a real relation, either of equality or of inequality.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
these two sciences [arithmetic and algebra] are the foundation of all the others, and provide the true means of acquiring all the exact sciences.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
We [...] only want to believe what evidence compels us to believe.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
My hand is not my head [...]. It contains, so to speak, an infinity of nothings, the nothings of all that it is not.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
To think of nothing & not to think, to perceive nothing & not to perceive, is the same thing.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
It is therefore evident that in a finite portion of matter or in a finite mind, one cannot find enough reality to see the infinite.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
It is therefore not necessary that what represents contains in itself all the reality that it represents.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
We do not see material objects in themselves. We do not see them immediately and directly, since we often see ones that do not exist.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
Should one judge the reality of ideas by the vividness of the perceptions they produce in you? If so, one would have to believe there is more reality in the point of a thorn [...] than in the entire universe.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
One must judge that two things are different when one has different ideas of them, when one can think of one without thinking of the other.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
[...] we have an inner feeling that all our perceptions of objects are made in us without us, and even in spite of us [...].
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
Take away ideas, you take away truths, for it is evident that truths are only the relationships that exist between ideas.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
Your abstractions deceive you: what, do you think that there is an errant figure, a roundness, for example, that makes a ball round [...]?
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
Do not, therefore, humanize divinity; never judge the infinitely perfect Being by yourselves.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
It is because [the true Li] always follows very simple Laws [...] that storms form and ravage the harvests [...]. It is the same conduct that produces such different effects.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
The happiness of man is not God's end, I mean his principal end, his ultimate end. God is his own end.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
One can affirm of a thing what one clearly conceives to be contained in the idea of that thing.
1707
Source: Conversation Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher
The union of the mind with the body infinitely debases man; and it is today the principal cause of all his errors and all his miseries.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
They study more to acquire a chimerical greatness in the imagination of other men than to give their own minds more strength and breadth.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The most beautiful, most pleasant, and most necessary of all our knowledge is undoubtedly the knowledge of ourselves.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Being always away from home, they do not notice the disorders that occur there; they think they are well, because they do not feel themselves.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Men can regard astronomy, chemistry, and almost all other sciences as diversions [...], but they must not [...] prefer them to the science of man.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The mind must judge all things according to its inner lights, without listening to the false and confused testimony of its senses and its imagination.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The pride of certain scholars, who want to be believed on their word, seems unbearable to us.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The principal cause of our errors is that our judgments extend to more things than the clear view of our mind.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
If men were very enlightened, universal approval would be a reason: but it is quite the contrary.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
Error is the cause of men's misery; it is the evil principle that has produced evil in the world.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One must work without cease not to be mistaken, since one wishes without cease to be delivered from one's miseries.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
The will is a blind power, which can only direct itself toward things that the understanding represents to it.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is to make oneself a slave against the will of God to submit to the false appearances of truth.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
One should never give full consent except to propositions that appear so evidently true that one cannot refuse it to them without feeling an inner pain and secret reproaches from reason.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth
It is not our senses that deceive us, but our will that deceives us through its hasty judgments.
1674-1675
Source: The Search After Truth