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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
The Renaissance38 quotes
Happy is he who, like Ulysses, has made a glorious voyage. — Joachim du Bellay · 1558Speak the truth and shame the Devil. — Francois Rabelais · 1564I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580It happens as with the cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580All 38 quotes →Age of Enlightenment28 quotes
And with the guts of the last priest
Let's wring the neck of the last king. — Denis Diderot · 1772I think, therefore I am. — Rene Descartes · 1637If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others? — Voltaire · 1759The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. — Blaise Pascal · 1662God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager?... If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. — Blaise Pascal · 1662I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away? — Voltaire · 1759All 28 quotes →Middle Ages12 quotes
We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size. — Bernard of Chartres · 1159I have freed my soul. — Bernard of Clairvaux · 1152Where true love is, it showeth; it will not feign. — Christine de Pizan · 1399For we do not easily expect evil of those whom we love most. — Peter Abelard · 1132I am dying of thirst by the side of the fountain. — Charles d'Orleans · 1440You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. — St. Bernard of Clairvaux · 1147All 12 quotes →