This is how man crawls when he wants to capture nature in action. He imagines points and lines, when he wants to imitate his image; he imagines its motion and weight, when he wants to imitate its force; he divides time into years, days, and hours, when he wants to express its flow, or takes his step as the measure of its extent. But the measure of nature is not the step, nor the millions and millions of steps, but infinity; time is not hers, but man's; its force and images are the essence of life in general.
I call virtue the habit of acting in a way that is useful for the whole society.
And thus everything that exists in time and space contains within itself the concept of the unintelligible; and so is our knowledge, which consists only of information derived from what exists in time and space.
Thus, error stands next to truth, and how can a man not err? If his knowledge were deep, then our judgment would be not only sure, but also clear! For the opposite of any judgment would have been impossible. In such a situation, man would never be wrong.
Nothing is more familiar to us, nothing seems simpler to us than speech, but in reality, there is nothing more wonderful than this.
Priests have always been the ones who limited the possibility and desire of people to gain their freedom of thought, they clipped their wings, lest they take their flight to the sublime and freedom.
As there are ways to knowledge, there are as many ways to error.
You only become a man when you learn to see the man in your neighbor.
Man made many discoveries, penetrated the secrets of the universe, left nothing undiscovered, knew the laws of nature. Man's purpose is to discover the rationality of the universe in its diversity. Man fought for life, overcame obstacles, even tried to know the Creator. O mortal! Wake up and follow your voice of reason because it is the spark of God.
The more man penetrates into the essence of nature, the more obvious the simplicity of its laws becomes.
The more man knows, the more nature reveals its secrets.
As physical exercise strengthens the health of the body, so mental exercise strengthens the reason.
Is silence a good thing? In prison, for example, one lives quietly, but does it follow from this that it is good there? The Greeks locked in the cave of Cyclopiior lived there quietly, waiting for their turn to be eaten.
Beware of the passions that lie to us and make us commit what we do not want.
You will never raise wise men if you kill the wit in the child.
If we replace the pleasant with the useful, the pleasant always wins.
The biggest mistake of the education process is haste.
I am afraid that he who behaves with me at the first meeting as if we had known each other for twenty years, will not behave, in twenty years, as if he had never known me, if I ask him for any service.
To see an injustice and to be silent is to take part.
Imagination embellishes nothing of what we already possess; blindness ends the moment satisfaction begins.
Usually, people who know little are very talkative, and people who know a lot talk little.
Human education begins from the moment of birth. He doesn't speak yet, he doesn't hear, but he's already learning. Experience precedes learning. The less people know, the more they think they know.
All passions are good when we know how to control them, and they are bad when we obey them.
Our wisdom consists of slavish superstitions. All our habits are only submission, oppression, rapture.
All man's morality lies in his intentions.
Let childhood ripen in childhood.
Good is the sublime in action.
The good that someone has done for us binds us emotionally to him.
The only art of being happy is to recognize that your happiness is in your hands.
If we hated vice as much as we loved pleasure, we could as easily abstain from tempting sin as from the deadly poison in our favorite food.