Il est plus aisé de connaître l’homme en général que de connaître un homme en particulier.
It is easier to know man in general than to know one man.
François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678).
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
Satius est supervacua scire quam nihil.
It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.
Seneca the Younger, Letter LXXXVIII: “On liberal and vocational studies.”
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
Aristotle, Politics, Book V, 1311a.11.
All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.
Plotinus, First Ennead, II.3.7.
It is disgraceful, instead of proceeding ahead, to be carried along, and then suddenly, amid the whirlpool of events, to ask in a dazed way: “How did I get into this condition?”
Seneca the Younger, Letter XXXVII: “On Allegiance to Virtue.”
A man should be upright, not kept upright.
La plus belle des ruses du diable est
de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.
The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.
Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris (1869; posthumous).
Paraphrased in The Usual Suspects as “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Sketch of the author is by Édouard Manet.
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London: A. Millar, 1764), vol. I, essay IV.
No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch, or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, colored by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.
Carl Gustav Jung, Paracelsus the Physician (1942).