Baron d'Holbach Quotes (9 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Works

The System of Nature

Baron d'Holbach

Baron d'Holbach: 9 quotes10 likes

Famous Baron d'Holbach Quotes

“We are all just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always meant to do, with no actual volition.”

“When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.”

Baron d'Holbach

Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas (London: W. Stewart & Co., ca. 1900) ( Project Gutenberg e-text http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/gsens10.txt), preface <br class="br">Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier.

“All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.”

Baron d'Holbach

ibid., chap. 30

“Now, if the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.”

Baron d'Holbach

La Système de la nature; quoted in The Law of Reason, published by J. Thompson, p. 40.
Variant: Now, if the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

“Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.”

Baron d'Holbach

ibid., chap. 206

“Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.”

Baron d'Holbach

ibid., preface

“It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.”

Baron d'Holbach book The System of Nature

Samuel Wilkinson, trans., The System of Nature ( Project Gutenberg e-text http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/7son110.txt), vol. 1, chap. IX <br class="br">Date and place of publication unknown. Original publication in French, 1770, as La Système de la nature, under the name of Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud.

“Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.”

Baron d'Holbach

La Système de la nature; quoted by Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment p. 220 (paperback edition)

“Everything that passes in the world, proves to us, in the clearest manner, that it is not governed by an intelligent being.”

Baron d'Holbach

Good Sense, or Natural Ideas vs. Supernatural