Pierre Bayle Quotes

Reason is like a runner who doesn't know that the race is over, or, like Penelope, constantly undoing what it creates.... It is better suited to pulling things down than to building them up, and better at discovering what things are not, than what they are.

If the Multiplicity of Religions prejudices the State, it proceeds from their not bearing with one another but on the contrary endeavouring each to crush and destroy the other by methods of Persecution. In a word, all the Mischief arises not from Toleration, but from the want of it.

There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.