Quote collection
223 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic."
"Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it."
"No one doubts but that we imagine time from the very fact that we imagine other bodies to be moved slower or faster or equally fast. We are accustomed to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion."
"The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it."
"He who wishes to revenge injuries by reciprocal hatred will live in misery. But he who endeavors to drive away hatred by means of love, fights with pleasure and confidence; he resists equally one or many men, and scarcely needs at all the help of fortune. Those whom he conquers yield joyfully"
"Ceremonies are no aid to blessedness."
"One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf."
"Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone."
"I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy."
"How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
"Will and intellect are one and the same thing."
"True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real."
"In proportion as we endeavor to live according to the guidance of reason, shall we strive as much as possible to depend less on hope, to liberate ourselves from fear, to rule fortune, and to direct our actions by the sure counsels of reason."
"Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it."
"As though God had turned away from the wise, and written his decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!"
"To understand something is to be delivered of it."
"Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another."
"In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity."
"In regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another."
"Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad."