Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Grand Master Architect, p. 191
Context: Man is encompassed with a dome of incomprehensible wonders. In him and about him is that which should fill his life with majesty and sacredness. Something of sublimity and sanctity has thus flashed down from heaven into the heart of every one that lives. There is no being so base and abandoned but hath some traits of that sacredness left upon him; something, so much perhaps in discordance with his general repute, that he hides it from all around him; some sanctuary in his soul, where no one may enter; some sacred inclosure, where the memory of a child is, or the image of a venerated parent, or the remembrance of a pure love, or the echo of some word of kindness once spoken to him; an echo that will never die away.
“It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.”
Samuel Wilkinson, trans., The System of Nature ( Project Gutenberg e-text http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/7son110.txt), vol. 1, chap. IX
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.
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Baron d'Holbach 9
French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist 1723–1789Related quotes
Source: An Exposition of the Old and New Testament
“Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.”
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), The Libation Bearers, line 103
Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), V
Context: A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?
Quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Misc Quotes
Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)
“Seriousness is the Christian's ballast which keeps him from being overturned with vanity.”
The Christian Soldier; or Heaven Taken by Storm (1669).
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