Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.
I feel an army in my fist.
Virtue is no empty echo.
Appearance should never attain reality, And if nature conquers, then must art retire.
Don’t let your heart depend on things That ornament life in a fleeting way! He who possesses, let him learn to lose, He who is fortunate, let him learn pain.
I am called The richest monarch in the Christian world; The sun in my dominion never sets.
When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.
Man is only fully human when he plays!
It is a ring that makes a marriage and it is from rings that chains are made.
The child of nature, when he breaks loose, becomes a madman; but the art scholar, when he breaks loose, becomes a debased character.
Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.
Misanthropy is a slow suicide.
Mazarin shed tears over this great loss, which Conde, who had no feeling for anything but glory, disregarded. “A single night in Paris,” said he, “gives birth to more men than this action has destroyed.
Brief is the sorrow – endless is the joy!
If desire seizes directly upon its object, contemplation removes its object to a distance, and makes it into a true and inalienable possession by putting it beyond the reach of passion.
To what absurd conclusions must this notion of a sympathy of souls, derived from the propinquity of bodies, inevitably tend? A common source of being is to produce community of sentiment; identity of matter, identity of impulse.
Steh zu deinem Volk! Es ist dein angeborner Platz!
Und bin ich strafbar, weil ich menschlich war?
Yet out of this fearful war Europe came forth free and independent. In it she first learned to recognize herself as a community of nations; and this intercommunion of states, which originated in the thirty years’ war, may alone be sufficient to reconcile the philosopher to its horrors.
The Maid of Orleans.
Religious fanaticism anticipates even the remotest dangers. Enthusiasm never calculates its sacrifices.