WednesdayOct 29, 2025
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.
The most manifest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness.
No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.
How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables to us!
It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.
He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.
In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection, otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.
How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!
Since we cannot match it let us take our revenge by abusing it.
We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.
To philosophize is to doubt.
The easy, gentle, and sloping path ... is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.
Those who have compared our life to a dream were right.... We sleeping wake and waking sleep.
There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.
I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself.
Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.
After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to the spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the slaughter of men, to the gladiators.
Lies Lying::'He who has not a good memory should never take upon himself the trade of lying.
... there is nevertheless a certain respect, a general duty to humanity, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and graciousness and benignity to other creatures ... there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and us.
I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.
No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.
I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.
Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.
There never were in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity.
There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
Ambition is not a vice of little people.
Since I would rather make of him [the child] an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to Choose a guide [tutor] with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.
The clearest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness.
Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.
Are, at most, but inconsiderable props and appendages.
A noble farce, wherein kinds, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre.
Few men have been admired by their own households.
Our wisdom and deliberation for the most part follow the lead of chance.
This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking 'What do I know?'
Virtue can have naught to do with ease.... It craves a steep and thorny path.
Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.
For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: 'I settle nothing.... I do not understand it.... Nothing seems true that may not seem false.' Their sacramental word is ..., which is to say, I suspend my judgment.
I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak, and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.
We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.
A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom.
A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.
Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to despise our being.
True it is that she who escapeth safe and unpolluted from out of the school of freedom, giveth more confidence of herself than she who cometh sound out of the school of severity and restraint.
Saying is one thing and doing is another.
To make a crooked stick straight, we bend it to the contrary way.
I quote others only the better to express myself.
There is nothing on which men are commonly more intent than on making a way for their opinions.
A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.
The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould.... The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes.
Everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me.
My trade and my art is living.
Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself.
The mind is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not discreetly how to use it.
It (marriage) happens as with cages; the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.
Marriage may be compared to a cage: the birds outside frantic to get in and those inside frantic to get out.
Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out
A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid.
Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.
Malice sucks up the greater part of her own venom, and poisons herself.
What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.
The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them: a man may live long, yet get little from life. Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.
Make use of life while you have it. Whether you have lived enough depends upon yourself, not on the number of your years.
We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
It takes so much to be a king that he exists only as such. That extraneous glare that surrounds him hides him and conceals him from us; our sight breaks and is dissipated by it being filled and arrested by this strong light.
Only he can judge of matters great and high whose soul is likewise.
Thus we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by reason's way, not by popular say.
It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.
It is good to rub and polish your mind against the minds of others.
I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray.... I am myself the matter of my book.
A man may be humble through vainglory.
Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of ones own goodness.
I will follow the good side right to the fire but not into it if I can help it.
The man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
The thing I fear most is fear.
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by dozens. different translation Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.
I want death to find me planting my cabbages.
We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him.
When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me? When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not more of a pastime to her than she is to me?
When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books; they quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other peoples flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.
Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition and perchance to some excess I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
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