
“For such Truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome.”
Review and Conclusion, p. 396, (Last text line)
Leviathan (1651)
Il y a des vérités qui ne sont pas pour tous les hommes et pour tous les temps.
Letter to François-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis (23 April 1764)
Citas
Il y a des vérités qui ne sont pas pour tous les hommes et pour tous les temps.
“For such Truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome.”
Review and Conclusion, p. 396, (Last text line)
Leviathan (1651)
Against the Galilaeans (c. 362)
Context: All of us, without being taught, have attained to a belief in some sort of divinity, though it is not easy for all men to know the precise truth about it, nor is it possible for those who do know it to tell it to all men. … Surely, besides this conception which is common to all men, there is another also. I mean that we are all by nature so closely dependent on the heavens and the gods that are visible therein, that even if any man conceives of another god besides these, he in every case assigns to him the heavens as his dwelling-place; not that he thereby separates him from the earth, but he so to speak establishes the King of the All in the heavens as in the most honourable place of all, and conceives of him as overseeing from there the affairs of this world. What need have I to summon Hellenes and Hebrews as witnesses of this? There exists no man who does not stretch out his hands towards the heavens when he prays; and whether he swears by one god or several, if he has any notion at all of the divine, he turns heavenward. And it was very natural that men should feel thus.
“Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”
The Sun Rising, stanza 1
Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 21.
The Uttarpara Address (1909)
Context: That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose. This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy. It is the one religion which impresses on mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass all the possible means by which man can approach God. It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth which all religions acknowledge that He is in all men and all things and that in Him we move and have our being. It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to realise it with every part of our being. It is the one religion which shows the world what the world is, that it is the Lila of Vasudeva. It is the one religion which shows us how we can best play our part in that Lila, its subtlest laws and its noblest rules. It is the one religion which does not separate life in any smallest detail from religion, which knows what immortality is and has utterly removed from us the reality of death.
“Never believe the speech of all men, nor all the things that you hear sung.”
The Proverbs of Alfred, st. 19, as published in The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus (1848) http://archive.org/stream/dialogueofsalomo00kembuoft#page/226/mode/2up/search/Alfred, edited by John Mitchell Kemble, p. 237.
Misattributed
Quoted in: Chalmers Izett Paton (1872) Freemasonry and its jurisprudence, p. 56.
Si tous sont destinés en naissant à souffrir la violence, c'est là une vérité à laquelle l'empire des circonstances ferme les esprits des hommes.
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 163
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)