Ralph Cudworth Quotes

#1. Things are sullen, and will be as they are, whatever we think them or wish them to be.

Ralph Cudworth

#2. Christ was vitoe magister, not scholoe; and he is the best Christian whose heart beats with the purest pulse towards heaven; not he whose head spinneth out the finest cobwebs.

Ralph Cudworth

#3. We have all a propensity to grasp at forbidden fruit.

Ralph Cudworth

#4. If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand.

Ralph Cudworth

#5. A good conscience is the best looking-glass of heaven.

Ralph Cudworth

#6. True zeal is an ignis lambeus, a soft and gentle flame, that will not scorch one's hand.

Ralph Cudworth

#7. Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigor and power of the mind, displaying itself from within.

Ralph Cudworth

#8. The golden beams of truth and the silken cords of love, twisted together, will draw men on with a sweet violence, whether they will or not.

Ralph Cudworth

#9. Now all the knowledge and wisdom that is in creatures, whether angels or men, is nothing else but a participation of that one eternal, immutable and increased wisdom of God.

Ralph Cudworth

#10. Truth and love are two of the most powerful things in the world; and when they both go together they cannot easily be withstood.

Ralph Cudworth

#11. Sense is a line, the mind is a circle. Sense is like a line which is the flux of a point running out from itself, but intellect like a circle that keeps within itself.

Ralph Cudworth

#12. The true knowledge or science which exists nowhere but in the mind itself, has no other entity at all besides intelligibility; and therefore whatsoever is clearly intelligible, is absolutely true.

Ralph Cudworth

#13. Truth is the most unbending and uncompliable, the most necessary, firm, immutable, and adamantine thing in the world.

Ralph Cudworth

#14. Some who are far from atheists, may make themselves merry with that conceit of thousands of spirits dancing at once upon a needle's point.

Ralph Cudworth