143 quotes
Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.
Aphorisms (1765)
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
Aphorisms (1765)
Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.
Aphorisms (1765)
First we have to believe, and then we believe.
Aphorisms (1765)
A on his lips and not-A in his heart.
Aphorisms (1765)
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
Aphorisms (1765)
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
Aphorisms (1765)
Reason now gazes above the realm of the dark but warm feelings as the Alpine peaks do above the clouds. They behold the sun more clearly and distinctly, but they are cold and unfruitful.
Aphorisms (1765)
He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.
Aphorisms (1765)
I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
Aphorisms (1765)
The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
Aphorisms (1765)
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
Aphorisms (1765)
It is a question of whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when he hits the chair he has bumped into.
It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.
Aphorisms (1765)
What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
Aphorisms (1765)
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
Aphorisms (1765)
Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
Aphorisms (1765)
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
Aphorisms (1765)
Ideas too are a life and a world.
Aphorisms (1765)
Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.
Aphorisms (1765)