Julien Offray de La Mettrie Quotes

Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art.

A geometrician has learned to perform the most difficult demonstrations and calculations, as a monkey has learned to take his little hat off and on...

A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues.

[W]hy should we divide the sensitive principle which thinks in man? ...For a thing that is divided can no longer without absurdity be regarded as indivisible.

I reduce to two the systems of philosophy which deal with man's soul. The first and older system is materialism; the second is spiritualism.

There comes up another difficulty which more nearly concerns our vanity: namely, the impossibility of our conceiving this property [the faculty of feeling] as a dependence or attribute of matter.

The mind, like the body, has its contagious diseases and its scurvy. ...[W]e catch everything from those with whom we come in contact; their gestures, their accent, etc.

If one's organism is... the preeminent advantage, and the source of all others, education is the second. The best made brain would be a total loss without it...

Descartes, a genius made to blaze new paths and to go astray in them, supposed with some other philosophers that God is the only efficient cause of motion, and that every instant He communicates motion to all bodies. But this opinion is but an hypothesis which he tried to adjust to the light of faith; and in so doing he was no longer attempting to speak as a philosopher or to philosophers. Above all he was not addressing those who can be convinced only by the force of evidence.

[I]magination is the soul, since it plays all the roles of the soul.

In general, the form and the structure of the brains of quadrupeds are almost the same as those of the brain of man...

[E]verything is the work of imagination, and... all the faculties of the soul can be correctly reduced to pure imagination...

It is not enough for a wise man to study nature and truth; he should dare state truth for the benefit of the few who are willing and able to think.

Whatever the virtue may be, from whatever source it may come, it is worthy of esteem... Mind, beauty, wealth, nobility, although the children of chance, all have their own value, as skill, learning and virtue have theirs.

[M]an... whatever the origin of his soul, if it is pure, noble, and lofty, it is a beautiful soul which dignifies the man endowed with it.