Baron d'Holbach Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

Science is the only way we have of shoving truth down the reluctant throat.

Baron d'Holbach
Man is the work of nature: he exists in nature: he is submitted to her laws: he cannot deliver himself from them: nor step beyond them, even in thought.

Baron d'Holbach
Man seeks to range out of his sphere: notwithstanding the reiterated checks his ambitious folly experiences, he still attempts the impossible; strives to carry his researches beyond the visible world; and hunts out misery in imaginary regions.

Baron d'Holbach
Man disdains the study of nature, to pursue phantoms, which resemble the Will with the Wisp, which at once terrifies and dazzles the benighted traveler, and which make him quit the simple road to truth, without pursuing which, he can never arrive at happiness.

Baron d'Holbach
Man unfortunately for himself, wishes to exceed the limits of his sphere, and to transport himself beyond the visible world. He neglects experience, and feeds himself with conjectures.

Baron d'Holbach
Every thing in the universe is in motion; the essence of nature is to act; and if we consider attentively its parts, we shall see that there is not a particle which enjoys absolute repose.

Baron d'Holbach
Instead... of seeking out of the world he inhabits for beings who can procure him a happiness denied to him by Nature, let man study this Nature, let him learn her laws, contemplate her energies [and] observe the immutable rules by which she acts.

Baron d'Holbach
Every probability - and most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities - is provided with buffers at both ends, which break the force of opposite opinions clashing against it; but scientific certainty has no spring in it, no courtesy, no possibility of yielding. All this must react on the minds which handle these forms of truth.

Baron d'Holbach
Chance; a word void of sense, which we always oppose to that of intelligence without attaching to it any certain ideas.

Baron d'Holbach
It is thus that in the universe everything is connected; it is itself but an immense chain of causes and effects, which flow without ceasing one from the other.

Baron d'Holbach
If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

Baron d'Holbach
As all the world are nearly agreed that matter can, never be totally annihilated, or cease to exist, how can we understand, that that which cannot cease to be... could ever have had a beginning?

Baron d'Holbach
All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.

Baron d'Holbach
Man is only unhappy because he is ignorant of nature.

Baron d'Holbach
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.

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 ignorance of nature gave birth to the Gods, knowledge of nature is destined to destroy them.

Baron d'Holbach
Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.

Baron d'Holbach
It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

Baron d'Holbach
Art is only Nature operating with the aid of the instruments she has made.

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
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'Holbach
Now, if the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

Baron d'Holbach
If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.

Baron d'Holbach