When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.
BARON D'HOLBACHThe unhappiness of people is due to their ignorance of nature.
More Baron d'Holbach Quotes
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The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
Can theology give to the mind the ineffable boon of conceiving that which no man is in a capacity to comprehend? Can it procure to its agents the marvellous faculty of having precise ideas of a god composed of so many contradictory qualities?
BARON D'HOLBACH -
The unhappiness of people is due to their ignorance of nature.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
If the ministers of the Church have often permitted nations to revolt for Heaven’s cause, they never allowed them to revolt against real evils or known violencess. It is from Heaven that the chains have come to fetter the minds of mortals.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears?
BARON D'HOLBACH -
People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn’t it be better to depend on blind matter… than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?
BARON D'HOLBACH -
If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
It is very strange that men should deny a Creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
The source of man’s unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
These principles, universally recognized, are at fault when the question of the existence of God is considered; what has been said of Him is either unintelligible or perfectly contradictory; and for this reason must appear impossible to every man.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
The Jehovah of the Jews is a suspicious tyrant, who breathes nothing but blood, murder, and carnage, and who demands that they should nourish him with the vapours of animals.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
Don’t say anything about this to anybody. Any one would say that I am trying to play the good-natured philosopher. I am neither benefactor nor philosopher, but just a human being, and my charities are the pleasantest expense I have on these journeys.
BARON D'HOLBACH