From the orators were made talkers; from historians, polyhistors; from philosophers, sophists; from poets, wits.
Lies, fables and romances must needs be probable, but not the truth and foundation of our faith.
Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.
Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.
The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated.
When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function.
A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.
Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind nor bond of society.
The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.
What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave’s smock at home?
Physics is nothing but the ABC’s. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.
The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.
Do nothing or everything; the mediocre, the moderate, is repellent to me; I prefer an extreme.
If sensibility and understanding as the two branches of human knowledge spring from one common root, to what end such a violent, unauthorized and willful separation of that which nature has joined together! Will not both branches wither away and die through a dichotomy and division of their common root?
What one believes does not, therefore, have to be proved, and a proposition can be ever so incontrovertibly proven without on that account being believed.
Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of thought or wonder; – and would open their mouths – to winged sentences.
The most miraculous researchers into language are also, from time to time, the most impotent exegetes; – the strongest lawgivers are the destroyers of their tables, or they will become one-eyed through the fault of their children.
Faith is not the work of reason, and therefore cannot succumb to its attack, because faith arises just as little from reason as tasting and seeing do.
The purity of a language dispossesses it of its wealth; a correctness that is all too rigid takes away its strengh and manhood. In a city as big as Paris, forty learned men are procured each year, at no expense, who infalliably know what is pure and polite in their mother tongue and what is neccessary for the monopoly of this junkshop.
Everything that man in the beginning heard, saw with his eyes, contemplated, and felt with his hands, was a living word. For God was the Word. With this Word in his mouth and in his heart, the origin of language was as natural, as near and easy, as child’s play.