Date: 1665
"In the human heart new passions are for ever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another."
preview | full record— La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de (1613-1680)
Date: 1665
"Condemned men sometimes affect a steadfastness and indifference to death which is really only fear of looking death in the face; thus it can be said that this steadfastness and indifference do for their spirit what the bandage does for their eyes."
preview | full record— La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de (1613-1680)
Date: 1665
"The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body; what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease."
preview | full record— La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de (1613-1680)
Date: 1665
"Defects in the soul are like wounds in the body: whatever care is taken to heal them the scars always show"
preview | full record— La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de (1613-1680)
Date: 1665
"Youth is one long intoxication; it is reason in a fever."
preview | full record— La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de (1613-1680)
Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701
"The writers displayed many geometrical truths before my very eyes, as it were, and derived them by means of logical arguments"
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701
"We can best learn how mental intuition is to be employed by comparing it with ordinary vision."
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: w. 1628, published in 1684, 1701
"Moreover, as we said, we should not contemplate, in one and the same visual or mental gaze, more than two of the innumerable different dimensions which it is possible to depict in the imagination."
preview | full record— Descartes, René (1596-1650)
Date: 1748, 1749
"Thus it is only a posteriori, or as it were by disentangling the soul from the organs of the body, that we can, I do not say, discover with evidence the nature of man, but obtain the greatest degree of probability the subject will admit of."
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1748, 1749
"In proportion as the motion of the blood grows calm, a soft soothing sense of peace and tranquility spreads itself over the whole machine; the soul finds itself sweetly weighed down with slumber, and sinks with the fibres of the brain: it becomes thus paralytic as it were, by degrees, together w...
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)