Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law...

Philosophy & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek paintings


Yannis Stavrou, Sunday promenade, oil on canvas

"The universe is corporeal; all that is real is material, and what is not material is not real." - The Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes, the greatest materialist philosopher...

Rejecting Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy in favor of the philosophy of Galileo...

Thomas Hobbes

Quotations

• In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.
• It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
• Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.
• Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.
• 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 Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
• A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life.
• A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.
• A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.
• All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
• Curiosity is the lust of the mind.
• 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.
• He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.
• I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
• I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
• 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.
• Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.
• No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.
• Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.
• 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.