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.

The condition of man . . . is a condition of war of everyone against everyone

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

Life is nasty, brutish, and short

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.

Leisure is the mother of Philosophy

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.

A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life.

The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion.

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man's nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice.

A great leap in the dark

Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark

When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.

... it is one thing to desire, another to be in capacity fit for what we desire.

For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.

It's not the pace of life I mind. It's the sudden stop at the end.

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?

A man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing, and, as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous

What is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?

Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.

God put me on this Earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I'm so far behind that I'll never die".

The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions.

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

Give an inch, he'll take an ell.

As a draft-animal is yoked in a wagon, even so the spirit is yoked in this body

It is many times with a fraudulent Design that men stick their corrupt Doctrine with the Cloves of other mens Wit.

Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.

In the very shadows of doubt a thread of reason (so to speak) begins, by whose guidance we shall escape to the clearest light.

It is in the laws of a commonwealth, as in the laws of gaming: Whatsoever the gamesters all agree on, is injustice to none of them.

Fact be virtuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth

Look not at the greatness of the evil past, but the greatness of the good to follow.

I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts.

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind;

Liberty, to define it, is nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.