Date: 1665

"In the human heart new passions are for ever being born; the overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another."

— 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."

— 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."

— 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"

— La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de (1613-1680)

Date: 1665

"Youth is one long intoxication; it is reason in a fever."

— 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"

— 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."

— 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."

— Descartes, René (1596-1650)

Date: 1721, 1722

"Dissimulation, an art among us universally practised, and so necessary, is unknown here: they speak every thing, see every thing, and hear every thing: the heart, like the face, is visible."

— Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Date: 1692, 1724

"No, answer'd Mahomet, my Heart is not so easily wounded."

— Aulnoy, Madame d' (Marie-Catherine) (1650/51-1705)