Category: Thought

Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.

Roger Bacon, as cited by Peter Nicholls The Encyclopedia of science fiction: an illustrated A to Z (1979), p. 376.

The tone in which an Englishman expresses anger would, in Italy, be only a mark of surprise.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, as quoted in David Booth, The principles of English composition (1831), p. 8.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

Francis Bacon, “Of Studies,” Meditationes sacræ (1597).

La culture est un instrument manié par des professeurs pour fabriquer des professeurs qui à leur tour fabriqueront des professeurs.

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who, when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, part 2: “Uprootedness,” chapter 1: “Uprootedness in the Towns” (1949).

Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae.

To ask the proper question is half of knowing.

Roger Bacon, as cited in  LIFE (September 8, 1958), p. 73.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Francis Bacon, Essex’s Device (1595).

The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, as quoted in Antoine Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (trans. Robert Kerr, 1790), Preface, p. xiv.

It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater value. . . . If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain, or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation to our wants. What is more to the one is less to the other, and vice versa.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement (1776), as quoted in Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 5.

[F]airly stated, “Say’s law of markets” survives as the most fundamental “economic law” in all economic theory. It enunciates the principle that “demands in general” are “supplies in general” — different aspects of one phenomenon.

W.H. Hutt, A Rehabilitation of Say’s Law (1974), p. 3.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

George Santayana, as quoted in Jon Winokur’s compilation, The Portable Curmudgeon (1987).