Helvetius Quotes & Sayings

The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people. Thus the system of the materialists, the doctrine of Helvetius and also Locke has recieved the most acclaim amongst his class. Thus Kant even now will find more followers than Fichte. — Novalis

Envy honors the dead in order to insult the living. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Discipline is simply the art of making the soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

When a miser contents himself with giving nothing, and saving what he has got, and is in other respects guilty of no injustice, he is, perhaps, of all bad men the least injurious to society; the evil he does is properly nothing more than the omission of the good he might do. If, of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested, it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Truth is the torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Must we, under the happy hope of a false tranquility, sacrifice to the people in power the public welfare, and under vain pretence of preserving the peace, abandon the empire to robbers who would plunder it — Claude Adrien Helvetius

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Pleasure and pain are the only springs of action in man, and always will be. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

There is but one man who can believe himself free from envy; and it is he who has never examined his own heart. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Discipline is, in a manner, nothing else but the art of inspiring the soldiers with greater fear of their officers than of the enemy. This fear has often the effect of courage: but it cannot prevail against the fierce and obstinate valor of people animated by fanaticism, or warm love of their country. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

The man who believes he can do it is probably right. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

What makes men happy is liking what they have to do. This is a principle on which society is not founded — Claude Adrien Helvetius

The degree of genius necessary to please us is pretty nearly the same proportion that we ourselves have. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage. — Edmund Burke

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Following Locke's doctrine that the mind is a tabula rasa, Helvetius considered the differences between individuals entirely due to differences of education: in every individual, his talents and his virtues are the effect of his instruction. — Bertrand Russell

He who has no passion has no principal or motive to act. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers, which are always repulsed by the anvil. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

All men have an equal disposition for understanding. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

The men of sense, the idols of the shallow, are very inferior to the men of passions. It is the strong passions which, rescuing us from sloth, impart to us that continuous and earnest attention necessary to great intellectual efforts. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

The failure of the reformation to capture France had left for the Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers. — Will Durant

To be loved, we should merit but little esteem; all superiority attracts awe and aversion. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Education made us what we are. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Genius is nothing but continued attention. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

Virtue has many preachers, but few martyrs. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

There are men whom a happy disposition, a strong desire of glory and esteem, inspire with the same love for justice and virtue which men in general have for riches and honors ... But the number of these men is so small that I only mention them in honor of humanity. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

No nation has reason to regard itself superior to others by virtue of its innate endowment. — Claude Adrien Helvetius

By annihilating desires, you annihilate the mind. — Claude Adrien Helvetius