Baron d'Holbach: Man

Baron d'Holbach was French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist. Explore interesting quotes on man.
Baron d'Holbach: 18 quotes10 likes

“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

“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)