Claude Adrien Helvétius Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

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

Claude Adrien Helvétius
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 slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
[We must] substitute the language of interest for the tone of injury. Do not complain, appeal to interest.

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

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

Claude Adrien Helvétius
It is modesty that places in the feeble hand of beauty the sceptre that commands power.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
The passions are the celestial fire that vivifies the moral world. It is to them that the arts and sciences owe their discoveries, and man the elevation of his position.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
We don't call a man mad who believes that he eats God, but we do the one who says he is Jesus Christ.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
Remorse is nothing more than a foresight of the bodily pain to which some crime has exposed us.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
…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 honours.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
All men have an equal disposition for understanding.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
The ambitious do not belong to themselves: they are the slaves of the world.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
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.

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

Claude Adrien Helvétius
If chance be generally acknowledged to be the author of most discoveries in almost all the arts, and if in speculative sciences its power be less sensibly perceived, it is not perhaps less real...

Claude Adrien Helvétius