Man a Machine Quotes

“If there is a revelation, it can not then contradict nature.”

“[I]magination is the soul, since it plays all the roles of the soul.”

“One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason.”

“[I]t is comparatively rare to imagine a thing without the name or sign that is attached to it.”

“Wikipedia: Man a Machine”

“The soul follows the progress of the body, as it does the progress of education.”

“Thus the diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body.”

“[T]here are a thousand hereditary vices and virtues which are transmitted from parents to children...”

“[E]ither everything is illusion, nature as well as revelation, or experience alone can explain faith.”

“Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art.”

“[T]he finest, greatest, or strongest imagination is... the most suited to the sciences as well as to the arts.”

“Such is my system, or rather the truth, unless I am much deceived. It is short and simple. Dispute it now who will.”

“Man's preeminent advantage is his organism. ...Only through nature do we have any good qualities; to her we owe all that we are.”

“[S]ince... religion does not imply exact honesty, we are authorized by the same reasons to think that atheism does not exclude it.”

“Nature has created us solely to be happy—yes, all of us from the crawling worm to the eagle lost in the clouds.”

“What more do we know of our destiny than of our origin? Let us then submit to an invincible ignorance on which our happiness depends.”

“[I]f attention, that key or mother of the sciences, does not do its part, imagination can do little more than run over and skim its objects.”

“The soul and the body fall asleep together. ...the soul can no longer bear the burden of thought; it is in sleep as if it were not.”

“We are veritable moles in the field of nature; we achieve little more than the mole's journey and it is our pride which prescribes limits to the limitless.”

“[T]o destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God—I mean, nature.”