Claude Adrien Helvetius Quotes

#1. By annihilating desires, you annihilate the mind.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#2. 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 Helvetius

#3. 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.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#4. Envy honors the dead in order to insult the living.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#5. To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#6. Education made us what we are.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#7. Virtue has many preachers, but few martyrs.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

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

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#9. Must we, under the happy hope of a false tranquility, sacrifice to the people in power the public welfare, and under vain pretence of preserving the peace, abandon the empire to robbers who would plunder it

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#10. There is but one man who can believe himself free from envy; and it is he who has never examined his own heart.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

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

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#12. He who has no passion has no principal or motive to act.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#13. Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#14. Pleasure and pain are the only springs of action in man, and always will be.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

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

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#16. Genius is nothing but continued attention.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#17. A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#18. 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.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#19. To be loved, we should merit but little esteem; all superiority attracts awe and aversion.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

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

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#21. The degree of genius necessary to please us is pretty nearly the same proportion that we ourselves have.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#22. Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers, which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#23. All men have an equal disposition for understanding.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

#24. Discipline is simply the art of making the soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

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

Claude Adrien Helvetius