Thomas Hobbes Quotes - Page 5

When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.

And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition.

... it is one thing to desire, another to be in capacity fit for what we desire.

Subjects have no greater liberty in a popular than in a monarchial state. That which deceives them is the equal participation of command.

The power of a man is his present means to obtain some future apparent good.

Love is a person's idea about his/her needs in other person what you are attracted to.

If men are naturally in a state of war, why do they always carry arms and why do they have keys to lock their doors?

By this we may understand, there be two sorts of knowledge, whereof the one is nothing else but sense, or knowledge original (as I have said at the beginning of the second chapter), and remembrance of the same; the other is called science or knowledge of the truth of propositions, and how things are called, and is derived from understanding.

Scientia potentia est, sed parva; quia scientia egregia rara est, nec proinde apparens nisi paucissimis, et in paucis rebus. Scientiae enim ea natura est, ut esse intelligi non possit, nisi ab illis qui sunt scientia praediti.

Leisure can be one of the Mothers of Philosophy.

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

Leisure is the mother of philosophy; and commonwealth, the mother of peace and leisure.

Ambition, and Covetousnesse are Passions that are perpetually incumbent, and pressing.

To say God spake or appeared as he is in his own nature, is to deny his Infiniteness, Invisibility, Incomprehensibility.

Let a man (as most men do) rate themselves as the highest Value they can; yet their true Value is no more than it is esteemed by others.

And Beasts that have Deliberation , must necessarily also have Will .

No man can be judge to his own cause.

A covenant not to defend myself from force by force is always void. For ... no man can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. ... [The right] to defend ourselves [is the] summe of the Right of Nature.

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.

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.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

Emulation is grief arising from seeing one's self, exceeded or excelled by his concurrent, together with hope to equal or exceed him in time to come, by his own ability. But envy is the same grief joined with pleasure conceived in the imagination of some ill-fortune that may befall him.

When a man tells me God hath spoken in a dream, I know he dreamt that God spoke to him.

In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth, and not by their mediocrity, nor by their being commended. For several men praise several customs, and, contrarily, what one calls vice, another calls virtue, as their present affections lead them.

True and false are attributes of speech not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood. Error theremay be, as when we expect that which shall not be; or suspect what has not been: but in neither case can a man be charged with untruth.