💬 Quotes

"A man's rights are the measure of his duties, and he who is true to his own rights can never be false to the duties of others."

"Conscience cannot stand much in the presence of profit."

"Slaves are generally expected to sing, but seldom to think."

"Education and slavery are incompatible elements."

"To make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one."

"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."

"Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it."

"Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action."

"At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst."

"Both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue."

"For it is not through lack of knowledge that men err in their actions, but through lack of self-control or moral weakness (akrasia)."

"Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"

"Look out round the universe. What an immense concatenation of necessity, in which every particle influences every particle, and yet the whole repels our inquiries."

"The past is a bucket of ashes, but the future is the prize to be won."

"And what is this inadequate machinery, my dear Philo, that you could conjure up, wherein to erect such a vast and magnificent hypothesis? Are the internal structure of a watch, and the fabric of the universe, so strikingly similar that a conclusion from the one to the other is inevitable?"

"A judicious adaptor of means to ends is allowed to be a being of design and intelligence, though lame, blind, or decrepit: why not give the same concession to the universe? A clumsy nature is still nature."

"To be a philosophical skeptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian."

"If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and proportioned a machine! And may we not prostrate ourselves before the universe, and confess it to be the work of a yet more perfect designer?"

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

"Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."