21 quotes
If indeed there were a judgment-day, it would be for man to appear at the bar not as a criminal but as accuser.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
What a state of society is this in which free-thinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
The Supreme Power is not a Mind; not a Force; not a Being, but something higher than a Being; something for which we have no words, something for which we have no ideas.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors or philanthropists; but all men can join in that gigantic and godlike work, the progress of creation. Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
As for the system of the Commune, which makes it impossible for a man to rise or fall, it is merely the old caste system revived; if it could be put into force, all industry would be disheartened, emulation would cease, and mankind would go to sleep.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
As the saints and prophets were often forced to practise long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall upon them and their visions would appear, so Virtue in its purest and most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe and long continued culture of the mind. Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. … To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies rather than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents.
It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth, which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
In Europe itself it is not probable that war will ever absolutely cease until science discovers some destroying force so simple in its administration, so horrible in its effects, that all art, all gallantry, will be at an end, and battles will be massacres which the feelings of mankind will be unable to endure.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)
The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal.
The Martyrdom of Man (1872)