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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Economic literature11 quotes
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. — Adam Smith · 1776Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security... and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. — Adam Smith · 1776Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. — Adam Smith · 1759With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches; which, in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves. — Adam Smith · 1776Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. — Adam Smith · 1776There is no art which one government sooner learns of another, than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. — Adam Smith · 1776All 11 quotes →Philosophical literature8 quotes
Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. — Adam Smith · 1759Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. — Adam Smith · 1759Never complain of that of which it is at all times in your power to rid yourself. — Adam Smith · 1759We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish ourselves. — Adam Smith · 1759How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. — Adam Smith · 1759Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations... His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. — Adam Smith · 1759All 8 quotes →Scientific literature1 quote
Wonder... And not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature. — Adam Smith · 1790