Quotes · Skopia

202 quotes

I am condemned to be free. — Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943 The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. — Blaise Pascal · 1662 We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience. — Blaise Pascal · 1662 God 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 · 1662 What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earth-worn, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe. — Blaise Pascal · 1670 The last act is bloody, no matter how happy the rest of the play. — Blaise Pascal · 1670 All 30 quotes →

Political literature21 quotes

Religious insanity is very common in the United States. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840 Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840 The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840 Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.... Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840 They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1835 Nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1835 All 21 quotes →

Modernist literature15 quotes

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. — Marcel Proust · 1922 The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. — Marcel Proust · 1922 We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. — Marcel Proust · 1922 Once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime flowers which my aunt used to give me... Immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater. — Marcel Proust · 1913 Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages. — Marcel Proust · 1921 There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer. — Marcel Proust · 1922 All 15 quotes →

Historical literature10 quotes

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 To tell the truth, one is not born a genius: one becomes a genius. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1949 It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution... The social order destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1856 Despots themselves do not deny that freedom is excellent; only they desire it for themselves alone, and they maintain that everyone else is altogether unworthy of it. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1856 All 10 quotes →

Satire10 quotes

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. — Voltaire · 1759 If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others? — Voltaire · 1759 I 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 · 1759 We must cultivate our garden. — Voltaire · 1759 Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need. — Voltaire · 1759 She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying. — Voltaire · 1759 All 10 quotes →

Comedy (play)9 quotes

One is easily fooled by that which one loves. — Moliere · 1669 He who lives without tobacco is not worthy to live. — Moliere · 1665 It is public scandal that constitutes offence, and to sin in secret is not to sin at all. — Moliere · 1669 Of all human follies there's none could be greater Than trying to render our fellow-men better. — Moliere · 1666 We only die once, and for such a long time! — Moliere · 1656 You see him laboring to produce bons mots. — Moliere · 1666 All 9 quotes →

Feminist literature4 quotes

Autobiography and memoir3 quotes

The world began without the human race and it will end without it... Man has never-save only when he reproduces himself-done other than cheerfully dismantle millions upon millions of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated. — Claude Levi-Strauss · 1955 To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude. — Simone de Beauvoir · 1960 Rob him of his illusions, and man would perish of very weariness and despair. — Anatole France · 1922

Comedy2 quotes

We only die once, and for such a long time! — Moliere · 1656 You see him laboring to produce bons mots. — Moliere · 1666

Biography1 quote

The artist must have the patience of water that eats away the rock drop by drop. — Auguste Rodin

Comedic play1 quote

The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself. — Moliere · 1666

Psychological literature1 quote

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. — Daniel Kahneman · 2011

Scientific literature1 quote

We must trust to nothing but facts: these are presented to us by nature and cannot deceive. — Antoine Lavoisier · 1789

Sociology1 quote

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. — Guy Debord · 1967

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