Victor Cousin Quotes

#1. If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people.

Victor Cousin

#2. All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.

Victor Cousin

#3. We need religion for religions's sake, morality for morality's sake and art for art's sake.

Victor Cousin

#4. All men have an equal right to the free development of their faculties; they have an equal right to the impartial protection of the state; but it is not true, it is against all the laws of reason and equity, it is against the eternal nature of things.

Victor Cousin

#5. What is philosophy? It is something that lightens up, that makes bright.

Victor Cousin

#6. Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice.

Victor Cousin

#7. True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.

Victor Cousin

#8. The beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.

Victor Cousin

#9. In everything the ends well defined are the secret of durable success.

Victor Cousin

#10. Written laws are formulas in which we endeavor to express as concisely as possible that which, under such or such determined circumstances, natural justice demands.

Victor Cousin

#11. The universal and absolute law is that natural justice which cannot be written down, but which appeals to the hearts of all.

Victor Cousin

#12. Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage.

Victor Cousin