Claude Adrien Helvetius Men Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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