
Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)
Ferneze, Act V
The Jew of Malta (c. 1589)
Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)
“Fortune has taken away, but Fortune has given.”
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXIII
“Thus neither the praise nor the blame is our own.”
"From a Letter to the Rev. Mr. Newton", line 21. (1782).
His last message, carved onto the walls of his dungeon cell, as quoted in For Faith and Freedom (1997) by Charles A. Howe, p. 109 <!-- Skinner House Books, Boston; also quoted on their web page [LINK now DEAD 2016·03·01] about the Transylvania Unitarian Church (Archive 2007) https://web.archive.org/web/20070717180511/www.emersonhou.org/Transylvania.htm by the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church, Houston -->
Context: Neither the sword of popes, nor the cross, nor the image of death — nothing will halt the march of truth. I wrote what I felt and that is what I preached with trusting spirit. I am convinced that after my destruction the teachings of false prophets will collapse.
“Neither the gifts nor the blows of fortune equal those of nature.”
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 180.
“Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.”
Attributed in Henry Louis Mencken (1942), A New Dictionary of Quotations
Misattributed
I, p. 448
1810s, Letters to John Taylor (1814)
Context: Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality; an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. If the substance in which this quality, attribute, adjective, call it what you will, exists, has a moral sense, a conscience, a moral faculty; if it can distinguish between moral good and moral evil, and has power to choose the former and refuse the latter, it can, if it will, choose the evil and reject the good, as we see in experience it very often does.
“That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.”
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LIX: On Pleasure and Joy
Poetical Portrait III
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)
“He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.”
Magnam habet cordis tranquillitatem, qui nec laudes curat, nec vituperia. — Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (ca. 1418), book II, ch. VI, paragraph 2.
Misattributed