Quote collection
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearence; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."
"He is happy whom circumstances suit his temper; but he Is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstance."
"Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness."
"All power, even the most despotic, rests ultimately on opinion."
"Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason."
"The heart of man is made to reconcile the most glaring contradictions."
"A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century."
"The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation."
"Habit may lead us to belief and expectation but not to the knowledge, and still less to the understanding, of lawful relations."
"It's when we start working together that the real healing takes place... it's when we start spilling our sweat, and not our blood."
"It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom."
"Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients: action, pleasure and indolence."
"Custom is the great guide to human life."
"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken."
"The difference between a man who is led by opinion or emotion and one who is led by reason. The former, whether he will or not, performs things of which he is entirely ignorant; the latter is subordinate to no one, and only does those things which he knows to be of primary importance in his life, and which on that account he desires the most; and therefore I call the former a slave, but the latter free."
"Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue."
"Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude."
"There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us."
"A little philosophy makes a man an Atheist: a great deal converts him to religion"
"Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain."