Julien Benda Quotes

#1. All Europe, including Erasmus, has followed Luther.

Julien Benda

#2. And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.

Julien Benda

#3. It may be said that modern Europe with teachers who inform it that its realist instincts are beautiful, acts ill and honors what is ill.

Julien Benda

#4. Teachers ... preach "the superiority of the intelligence"; but they preach it because in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions required for our interests, i.e. from exactly the same passion for the practical.

Julien Benda

#5. Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things "which cannot be shared," and if they raise themselves to a point where they adopt an abstract principle superior to their egotisms. In other words, it can only be obtained by a betterment of human morality.

Julien Benda

#6. The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to their nations as much as the day-laborer and the merchant.

Julien Benda

#7. I shall go further and say that even if an examination of the past could lead to any valid prediction concerning man's future, that prediction would be the contrary of reassuring.

Julien Benda

#8. Philosophy, which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, 'I think therefore I am," now raises him to say ... "I think, therefore I am not," (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action).

Julien Benda

#9. The modern moralists extol ... the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.

Julien Benda

#10. The modern clercs have created in so-called cultivated society a positive romanticism of harshness. The have also created a romanticism of contempt.

Julien Benda

#11. Nothing seems to me more doubtful than Aristotle's remark that it is probable the arts and philosophy have several times been discovered and several times lost.

Julien Benda