Skip to content

Quotes from Posthumous Manuscripts — Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

1796–1832 France

← All quotes by Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

58 quotes

Form resolutions in advance in order not to reflect during action. Then obey thyself blindly.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Why try to be witty? I would rather be thought stupid and modest than witty and pretentious.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Egotism is the most common and most hated of all vices. Properly speaking, it is the only one which should be hated.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

The laws of war, do they say? As if war were not the destruction of all laws.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Self-possession without self-sufficiency. Courage without effrontery.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

If Christianity were pruned of all which is not Christ, this religion would be the simplest in the world.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Make intimate acquaintances only with much circumspection; perfect confidence in those who have been thoroughly tested. Nothing to do with others.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Carry when walking a book, and a note-book to preserve the ideas, and a piece of bread in order to prolong the walk if need be.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Listen attentively to your interlocutor, and so prepare him to listen in the same way to your reply, and predispose him in favor of your arguments.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

To each conqueror can be said, when he has ceased tormenting our poor globe, "Would you not have been able to tilt equally well against a little globe of pasteboard?"

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

The Collision of Bodies. ...[I]n the collision of bodies there is always expenditure of motive power. Perfectly elastic bodies only form an exception, and none such are found in nature.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Life is a short enough passage. I am half the journey. I will complete the remainder as I can.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

The decadence of the Greeks and Romans... proves the influence of institutions upon customs.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

When a hypothesis no longer suffices to explain phenomena, it should be abandoned. This is the case with... caloric as matter, as a subtile fluid.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Let us not be exacting; perfection is so rare.
Indulgence! Indulgence!

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

War has been represented as necessary to prevent the too rapid increase of the population, but war mows down the flower of the young men, while it spares the men disgraced by nature. Hence it tends to the degeneration of the species.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

What motives have influenced the writers who have rejected all religious systems? Is it the conviction that the ideas which they oppose are all injurious to society? Have they not rather included in the same proscription religion and the abuse of it?

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Never direct an argument against any one. If you know some particulars against your adversary, you have a right to make him aware of it to keep him under control, but proceed with discretion, and do not wound him before others.

Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.