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.
• The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.
• 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.
• A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life.
• 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.
• All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
• 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.
• The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.
• Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.
• 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.
• The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
• 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.
• They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
• Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.
• 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.
• Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.
• Words are the money of fools.
• Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools.
• The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.
• I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
• 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.
• Curiosity is the lust of the mind.
• Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.
• 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.
• He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.
• Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.
• I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
• Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
• Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
• 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.
• In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.
• Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
• Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.
• No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.
• Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.
• 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.
• It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.