Pierre Bayle Quotes

Pierre Bayle was a French philosopher and writer best known for his seminal work the Historical and Critical Dictionary, publication beginning in 1697.

Bayle was a French Calvinist. As a forerunner of the Encyclopedists and an advocate of the principle of toleration, his works subsequently influenced the development of the Enlightenment. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. November 1647 – 28. December 1706
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Pierre Bayle: 3   quotes 1   like

Famous Pierre Bayle Quotes

“If the Multiplicity of Religions prejudices the State, it proceeds from their not bearing with one another but on the contrary endeavouring each to crush and destroy the other by methods of Persecution. In a word, all the Mischief arises not from Toleration, but from the want of it.”

Quoted in: Joseph LoConte, "The Golden Rule of Toleration" http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/thepastinthepresent/historymatters/goldenrule.html, Christianity Today, Accessed 6 March 2011

“Reason is like a runner who doesn't know that the race is over, or, like Penelope, constantly undoing what it creates…. It is better suited to pulling things down than to building them up, and better at discovering what things are not, than what they are.”

Pierre Bayle, Reply to the Questions of a Provincial (Réponse aux questions d'un provincial, 1703). Quoted in Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle, trans. Denys Potts (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 61

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