The Other World (1657)
Context: Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages.
I am not one to give in to the insolence of those brutes. I think the planets are worlds revolving around the sun and that the fixed stars are also suns that have planets revolving around them. We can't see those worlds from here because they are so small and because the light they reflect cannot reach us. How can one honestly think that such spacious globes are only large, deserted fields? And that our world was made to lord it over all of them just because a dozen or so vain wretches like us happen to be crawling around on it? Do people really think that because the sun gives us light every day and year, it was made only to keep us from bumping into walls? No, no, this visible god gives light to man by accident, as a king's torch accidentally shines upon a working man or burglar passing in the street.
“Most people judge men only by success or by fortune.”
La plupart des gens ne jugent des hommes que par la vogue qu'ils ont, ou par leur fortune.
Variant translation: Most people judge men only by their fashion or their fortune.
Maxim 212.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
"The Dreamers"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)
Context: The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.
Hansard, House of Commons 5th series, vol. 346, col. 2139.
Speech in the House of Commons on 4 May 1939 opposing conscription.
1930s
Source: The Jagged Orbit (1969), Chapter 46, “Why’s, After the Event” (p. 143)
“Most joyful let the Poet be;
It is through him that all men see.”
The Poet of the old and new Times, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Der eitle, schwache Mensch sieht in Jedem einen Richter, der stolze, starke hat keinen Richter als sich selbst.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 34.
Preface to the Fables.
Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700)
“Men see what they are most afraid of.”
Source: The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974), Chapter 4, p. 94.
