Quotes from Thomas Hobbes

Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools.

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.

[In a state of nature] No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.

The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature that is to say, of his own life.

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.

The disembodied spirit is immortal there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.

Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.

That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope the same, without such opinion, despair.

Humans are driven by a perpetual and restless desire of power.

Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

No mans error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.

Such truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome.

The privilege of absurdity to which no living creature is subject, but man only.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.