philosophy Quotes

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.