Claude Adrien Helvetius Quotations

Truth is the torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it.

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves.

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

There are men whom a happy disposition, a strong desire of glory and esteem, inspire with the same love for justice and virtue which men in general have for riches and honors. But the number of these men is so small that I only mention them in honor of humanity.

Discipline is simply the art of making the soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy.

By annihilating the desires, you annihilate the mind. Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

Virtue has many preachers, but few martyrs.

He who has no passion has no principal or motive to act.

Of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested; it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

When a miser contents himself with giving nothing, and saving what he has got, and is in other respects guilty of no injustice, he is, perhaps, of all bad men the least injurious to society; the evil he does is properly nothing more than the omission of the good he might do. If, of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested, it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.

Envy honors the dead in order to insult the living.

The man who believes he can do it is probably right.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

The degree of genius necessary to please us is pretty nearly the same proportion that we ourselves have.

Pleasure and pain are the only springs of action in man, and always will be.

There is but one man who can believe himself free from envy; and it is he who has never examined his own heart.

The men of sense, the idols of the shallow, are very inferior to the men of passions. It is the strong passions which, rescuing us from sloth, impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great intellectual efforts.

Genius is nothing but continued attention.

Discipline is, in a manner, nothing else but the art of inspiring the soldiers with greater fear of their officers than of the enemy. This fear has often the effect of courage: but it cannot prevail against the fierce and obstinate valor of people animated by fanaticism, or warm love of their country.

Education made us what we are.

Must we, under the happy hope of a false tranquility, sacrifice to the people in power the public welfare, and under vain pretence of preserving the peace, abandon the empire to robbers who would plunder it

To be loved, we should merit but little esteem; all superiority attracts awe and aversion.

No nation has reason to regard itself superior to others by virtue of its innate endowment.

By annihilating desires, you annihilate the mind.

All men have an equal disposition for understanding.

What makes men happy is liking what they have to do. This is a principle on which society is not founded