Aegina, Greece - 20071. “A fool is a man who never tried an experiment in his life.”
2. "A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit."
3. “… building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself.”
4. "Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?"
5. "Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself."
6. “Hear him, ye Senates, hear this truth sublime;
He who allows oppression shares the crime.”
7. “If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber? ... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.”
8. “If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
9. "In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can't long tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier his comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly."
10. “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”
11. “It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence.”
12. “It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is.”
13. “Jupiter, not wanting man's life to be wholly gloomy and grim, has bestowed far more passion than reason -- you could reckon the ration as twenty-four to one. Moreover, he confined reason to a cramped corner of the head and left all the rest of the body to the passions.”
14. "Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth."
15. “No one is to be despaired of as long as he breathes. (Where there is life there is hope.”
16. "Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another."
17. “The desire to write grows with writing.”
18. “The entire world is my temple, and a very fine one too, if I'm not mistaken, and I'll never lack priests to serve it as long as there are men.”
19. "The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death."
20. “The wedlocks of minds will be greater than that of bodies.”
21. “War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.”
22. "What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?"
23. "When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food."
24. "Your library is your paradise."
