“Language forms a kind of wealth, which all can make use of at once without causing any diminution of the store, and which thus admits a complete community of enjoyment; for all, freely participating in the general treasure, unconsciously aid in its preservation.”

Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon’s time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.

If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?

Mathematical Analysis is… the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.

The dead govern the living.

Woman is the most moral element in all humanity.

The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

The universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind.

Humanity is always made up of more dead than living.

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

Know yourself to improve yourself.

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

What I think we need to do is infuse everyday and every action with the kind of values we hope will be in the future, with kindness, with nurturing, with dreams, ambition, using your talents, not resorting to violence, other forms of conflict resolution, with humor, with poetry, with music.

Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.

An honest man you may form of windle-straws, but to make a rogue you must have grist.