Thomas Hobbes Quotes (49 Quotes)

Covenants without the sword are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.

Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.

In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.

The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.

The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.

Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools.

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.

Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.

Man is distinguished, not only by his reason but also by this singular passion from other animals... which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.

Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

The power of a man, to take it universally, is his present means, to obtain some future apparent good and is either original or instrumental.

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.

War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.

It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.

The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.

The errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning.

Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

As a draft-animal is yoked in a wagon, even so the spirit is yoked in this body.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

Geometry, which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life.

Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

No arts no letters no society and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.

Words are the money of fools.

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.

Opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion to what men fear, and talking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seeds of religion

There is more in Mersenne than in all the universities together.

Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. 'This' is that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.