Thomas Hobbes Quotes
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If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.
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This I know; God cannot sin, because his doing a thing makes it just, and consequently, no sin.... And therefore it is blasphemy to say, God can sin; but to say, that God can so order the world, as a sin may be necessarily caused thereby in a man, I do not see how it is any dishonor to him.
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Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
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Prophecy is many times the principal cause of the events foretold.
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The Imagination that is raised in man (or any other creature imbued with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signs, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beasts.
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By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.
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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.
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And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.
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Every man may think his own cause just till it be heard and judged.
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The Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.
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And Beasts that have Deliberation , must necessarily also have Will.
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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?
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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.
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Love is a person's idea about his/her needs in other person what you are attracted to.
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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.
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And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.
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Power as is really divided, and as dangerously to all purposes, by sharing with another an Indirect Power, as a Direct one.
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For it is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive no thing from them clearly; but rather by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, make everything more obscure than it is; an ordinary artifice of those who seek not the truth, but their own advantage.
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But if one Subject giveth Counsell to another, to do anything contrary to the Lawes, whether that Counsell proceed from evil intention, or from ignorance onely, it is punishable by the Common-wealth; because igorance of the Law, is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the Lawes to which he is subject.
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... it is one thing to desire, another to be in capacity fit for what we desire.
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Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
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Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
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When two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be CONSCIOUS of it one to another; which is as much as to know it together.
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True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.