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Of men who reach my tale of years
Who least has cause to make his moan?
He who has learnt to banish fears,
Who lives and dies unknown.”
Voltaire

death
fear

Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation: not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.”
Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Carus - De rerum natura

wind

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.”
Michel de Montaigne - Essays

death
garden

Laziness: the habit of resting before fatigue sets in.”
Jules Renard

habit

A systematic revolution of basic concepts begins with Einsteinian science. In the very detail of its concepts a relativism of the rational and the empirical is established. Science then undergoes what Nietzsche called "an upheaval of concepts," as if the earth, the universe, things, possessed a different structure from the fact that their explanation rests upon new foundations. All rational organization is "shaken" when the fundamental concepts undergo dialectical transformation.”
Gaston Bachelard

concept
earth
science
world

Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o'th'milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.”
William Shakespeare - Macbeth

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.”
François de La Rochefoucauld - Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims

My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein

difficulty

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”
Hannah Arendt

evil
good

One can say that to some extent fascism has added a new variation to the old art of lying — the most devilish variation — that of lying the truth.”
Hannah Arendt

lie
truth

Every animal loves itself.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero - De finibus bonorum et malorum

oneself

I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.”
Albert Einstein

fact
progress

Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.”
Hannah Arendt

politics

To save all we must dare all.”
Friedrich Schiller

to dare

The beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.”
Immanuel Kant

beauty
good
morality
symbol

Nothing so much prevents us from being natural as the desire to appear so.”
François de La Rochefoucauld - Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Love eagerly believes everything it wants to.”
Jean Racine

love

Some men make fortunes, but not to enjoy them; for, blinded by avarice, they live to make fortunes.”
Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis - Satires

The extreme limit of wisdom — that’s what the public calls madness.”
Jean Cocteau - Le Coq et l’Arlequin

wisdom

It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.”
Anatole France

absurd

The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal.”
Baruch Spinoza - Ethics

body
eternity
soul

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.”
Bertrand Russell

happiness

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”
Thomas Hobbes

Freedom in general may be defined as the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.”
Bertrand Russell

Desire
freedom

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!”
Charles Darwin

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”
Martin Heidegger

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
Albert Camus

beauty
eternity
time

A useless life is an early death.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

death
life

In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.”
François de La Rochefoucauld

Gratitude

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.”
Albert Camus

freedom
to die

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A Midsummer Night's Dream
À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles
A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues
A Treatise of Human Nature
A Woman of No Importance
Aeneid
Alcools
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
All's Well That Ends Well
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Analects
Animal Farm
Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?
Apology of Socrates
Art Poétique
As you like it
Being and Nothingness
Beyond Good and Evil
Candide ou l'Optimisme
Carnets
Causae et Curae
Chroniques
Citadelle
Codex Atlanticus
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Confessions
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
Correspondance avec Élisabeth
Course in General Linguistics
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Creative Evolution
Crisis of the Mind
Critique of Pure Reason
De finibus bonorum et malorum
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Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789
Dictionary of Received Ideas
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Don Carlos
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Ecoutez la chanson bien douce
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Walden; or, Life in the Woods
Wind, Sand and Stars
Zadig, or The Book of Fate

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