Claude Adrien Helvetius Quotations

Virtue has many preachers, but few martyrs.

He who has no passion has no principal or motive to act.

Of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested; it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

When a miser contents himself with giving nothing, and saving what he has got, and is in other respects guilty of no injustice, he is, perhaps, of all bad men the least injurious to society; the evil he does is properly nothing more than the omission of the good he might do. If, of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested, it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.

Discipline is simply the art of making the soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy.

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.

Envy honors the dead in order to insult the living.

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

The man who believes he can do it is probably right.