Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things.

The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as...

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow...

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.

Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.

It is true that men themselves made this world of nations… but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that...

Este universo es una gran ciudad en la que con una ley eterna Dios condena a los necios a hacer una guerra contra sí mismos. (…) Si algún idiota, por maldad perversa, por relajación o...

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.

Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.