For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.
Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.
Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.
The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion.
I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts.
Now I am about to take my last voyage a great leap in the dark.
Faith is a gift of God which man can neither give nor take away by promise of rewards or menaces of torture.
Appetite with an opinion of attaining is called hope the same without such opinion despair.
Passions unguided are for the most part mere madness.
If I had read as much as other men I should have known no more than they.
Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.
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 condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
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.
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.
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.
In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.
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.
Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
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.
I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.
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.
Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
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.
Such truth, as opposeth no man’s profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.
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.