126 quotes
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)
The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.
Aphorisms (1765)
Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
Aphorisms (1765)
As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn't let it go for less than half-a-crown.
Aphorisms (1765)
Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?
Aphorisms (1765)
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
Aphorisms (1765)
To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.
Aphorisms (1765)
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
Aphorisms (1765)
We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...
Aphorisms (1765)
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
Aphorisms (1765)
What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.
Aphorisms (1765)
There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.
Aphorisms (1765)
The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.
Aphorisms (1765)
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
Aphorisms (1765)