Famous Quotes

Quotes by Thomas Hobbes

• 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.
• Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.
• Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
• I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
• In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.
• It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
• Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
• Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
• 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.
• That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
• The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.