Baron d'Holbach Quotes

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• If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Ignorance, Men

  45 Copy quote

• The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?

  Baron d'Holbach

  Independent, Thinking, Desire

  31 Copy quote

• The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Science, Matter, Causes

  34 Copy quote

• All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Ignorance, Atheism

  34 Copy quote

• What, indeed, is an atheist? He is one who destroys delusions which are harmful to humanity in order to lead men back to nature, to reality, to reason. He is a thinker who, having reflected on the nature of matter, its energy, properties and ways of acting, has no need of idealized powers or imaginary intelligences to explain the phenomena of the universe and the operations of nature.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Reality, Men

  36 Copy quote

• All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Children, Ideas

  "Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas". Chap. 30. Book by Baron d'Holbach, 1900.

  35 Copy quote

• The unhappiness of people is due to their ignorance of nature.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Nature, Ignorance, People

  22 Copy quote

• Men always fool themselves when they give up experience for systems born of the imagination. Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he is subject to its laws, he can not break free, he can not leave even in thought; it is in vain that his spirit wants to soar beyond the bounds of the visible world, he is always forced to return.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Nature, Giving Up, Science

  18 Copy quote

• All religious notions are uniformly founded on authority; all the religions of the world forbid examination, and are not disposed that men should reason upon them.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Religious, Men, World

  24 Copy quote

• If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Ignorance, Knowledge

  "The System of Nature". Book by Baron d'Holbach, 1770.

  22 Copy quote

• Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Religion, Atheism

  26 Copy quote

• People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn't it be better to depend on blind matter... than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent. Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Death, Punishment, People

  25 Copy quote

• Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Religious, Tolerance, Atheism

  18 Copy quote

• The Jehovah of the Jews is a suspicious tyrant, who breathes nothing but blood, murder, and carnage, and who demands that they should nourish him with the vapours of animals. The Jupiter of the Pagans is a lascivious monster. The Moloch of the Phoenicians is a cannibal. The pure mind of the Christians resolved, in order to appease his fury, to crucify his own son. The savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Christian, Son, Animal

  13 Copy quote

• How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Ignorance, Men, Thinking

  23 Copy quote

• It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Inspirational, Life, Atheist

  "Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas". Book by Baron d'Holbach, 1900.

  20 Copy quote

• When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Men, Common Sense, Opinion

  "Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas". Book by Baron d'Holbach, 1900.

  18 Copy quote

• Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion, that we shall discover truth, morality and reason. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from these remedies which nature advocates, far from curing; it only aggravates, perpetuates and multiplies them.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Real, Ignorance, Men

  7 Copy quote

• The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Nature, Ignorance, Animal

  12 Copy quote

• Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Believe, Men, Sky

  "The Enlightenment". Book by Norman Hampson, 1968.

  18 Copy quote

• The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Atheist, Men, Race

  12 Copy quote

• It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Men, Vanity, Superstitions

  "The System of Nature". Vol. 1, chap. IX. Book by Baron d'Holbach, translated by Samuel Wilkinson, 1770.

  8 Copy quote

• Can theology give to the mind the ineffable boon of conceiving that which no man is in a capacity to comprehend? Can it procure to its agents the marvellous faculty of having precise ideas of a god composed of so many contradictory qualities?

  Baron d'Holbach

  Men, Ideas, Giving

  5 Copy quote

• Don't say anything about this to anybody. Any one would say that I am trying to play the good-natured philosopher. I am neither benefactor nor philosopher, but just a human being, and my charities are the pleasantest expense I have on these journeys.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Journey, Play, Say Anything

  8 Copy quote

• Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.

  Baron d'Holbach

  Selfish, War, Blood

  "Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas". Book by Baron d'Holbach, 1900.

  13 Copy quote

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