Philosophes Enlightenment Quotes & Sayings

The Shadow. It cannot be grasped. Chase your shadow and it will, flee; turn your back on it and it will follow you. It is also a person's dark side, the thing that makes them mysterious. After they have given us pleasure, the shadow of their withdrawal makes us yearn for their return, much as clouds make us yearn for the sun. — Robert Greene

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire. — Michael Dirda

I enjoyed meeting Emma [Watson]. I have a soft spot in my heart for child actors growing up. I know how hard that is. Having gone through that experience myself, I have a lot of sensitivity to it. For lack of a better word, I just feel like I love these kids, and I want them all to grow up and love themselves, and not get caught up in the wrong things, and to learn all the different things this profession has to give, and to understand it. — Ethan Hawke

The Angel's eyes widened curiously and her lips parted. a deep colour swept into her cheeks. She had intended to arouse him. She had more than succeeded. She was too young to know that in the effort to rouse a man, women frequently kindle fires that they neither can quench or control. — Gene Stratton-Porter

To realize the Enlightenment ideals of formal equality, the rule of law, freedom of commerce, and religious toleration, Voltaire and many of the other philosophes looked to absolutist monarchs, whose policies they hoped to influence. The support of the philosophes for the expansion of the monarch's sovereign power was tactical. It arose not out of a principled belief in the throne, but out of the recognition that only a strong monarchy had the power to override the resistance to enlightened legislation by the privileged churches, estates, and corporations that made up continental European society. (p. 45) — Jerry Z. Muller

What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better. — Haruki Murakami

I love character actors. If I'm switching channels, and something with Slim Pickens is on, or Walter Brennan, I'm stuck. I have to watch it. — Les Claypool

When a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful form, and the two are cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who has the eye to contemplate the vision. — Plato

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire. — James Joyce

People who are too uptight make me nervous. — Victoria Chang

You have to respect everybody's desires and way of living. — Juan Pablo Galavis

Children have to fly on a separate plane, and people older than 60 have to fly on a separate plane also, because for some reason, after you get a little older, you forget that when you pull on the seat in front of you to get up from your seat that the person sitting in that seat actually feels something. — Jay R. Ferguson

The relation of eugenics to British psychiatry bears examination. The primary controlling body for psychiatry in England is the British National Association for Mental Health (NAMH), formed in 1944, and initially run by the mentally unstable Montagu Norman, previously of the Bank of England. The group originally met at Norman's London home, where he and Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht had met in the 1930s to arrange financing for Hitler. — Jim Keith

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille. — Lytton Strachey

For months we have been making triumphant retreats before a demoralized enemy who is advancing in utter disorder. — Eric Frank Russell