“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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Pierre Bayle 3
French philosopher and writer 1647–1706Related quotes
"The Path of the Law," Address to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts at the dedication of the new hall of the Boston University School of Law (8 January 1897), published in Harvard Law Review, Vol. 10 (25 March 1897).
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Context: Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things — have even discovered them over and over again — and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways.