Julien Offray de La Mettrie Quotes

The ancients, persuaded that there is no body without a moving force, regarded the substance of bodies as composed of two primitive attributes. It was held that, through one of these attributes, this substance has the capacity for moving and, through the other, the capacity for being moved.

[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.

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

Write as if thou wert alone in the universe and hadst nothing to fear from the jealousies and prejudices of the people. Otherwise thou wilt miss thy purpose.

Man has been trained in the same way as animals. He has become an author, as they became beasts of burden.

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

[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.

[W]e must admit, with the same frankness, that we are ignorant whether matter has in itself the faculty of feeling, or only the power of acquiring it by those modifications or forms to which matter is susceptible; for it is true that this faculty of feeling appears only in organic bodies.
This is then another new faculty which might exist only potentially in matter, like all the others which have been mentioned; and this was the hypothesis of the ancients, whose philosophy, full of insight and penetration, deserves to be raised above the ruins of the philosophy of the moderns.

One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason.

We know in bodies only matter, and we observe the faculty of feeling only in bodies: on what foundation then can we erect an ideal being, disowned by all our knowledge?

[T]he sciences that are expressed by numbers or by other small signs, are easily learned; and... this facility rather than its demonstrability is what has made the fortune of algebra.

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.

Man's preeminent advantage is his organism. ...Only through nature do we have any good qualities; to her we owe all that we are.

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

[I]f we demonstrate this moving principle, if we show that matter, far from being as indifferent as it is supposed to be, to movement and to rest, ought to be regarded as an active, as well as a passive substance, what resource can be left to those who have made its essence consist in extension?