💬 Quotes

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

"Hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, - mon frère!"

"La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; / L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles / Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers."

"Mon enfant, songe à la douceur / D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble! / Aimer à loisir, / Aimer et mourir / Au pays qui te ressemble!"

"Une âme de carcan, une âme sans vertige, / Ô mon pauvre grand mort, ô mon cher indolent, / Es-tu bien aises d'être au pays de la Ghente..."

"Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux, / Jeune, et pourtant sinistre, andain, tout puissant, / Qui, salué par ses peuples, crache aux cieux / Un ennui lourd et sourd."

"Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!"

"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?"

"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!"

"O, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practice to deceive!"

"Sound, clarion, sound! fill, blow, full blast! / One blast were worth an interim of days, / Life-giving, 'midst the chorus of acclaim."

"Soldiers, rest! thy warfare o'er, / Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking; / Dream of battle fields no more, / Days of danger, nights of waking."

"Time rolls his ceaseless course. The race of yore, / Who danced our infancy upon their knee, / And told our marveling boyhood legends store, / Of their strange ventures happ'd by land or sea, / How are they blotted from the things to be!"

"To all, to each, a fair good-night, / And pleasing dreams, and slumbers light."