Julien Offray de La Mettrie

The soul is... but an empty word, of which no one has any idea, and which an enlightened man should use only to signify the part in us that thinks...

[H]e who has the most imagination should be regarded as having the most intelligence or genius, for all these words are synonymous...

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...

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.

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

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

[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...

[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.

As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibres, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them.

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...

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

What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language? An animal..

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

Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence... would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so.

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.

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

[T]he, diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body.

[A] brilliant man is his own best company, unless he can find other company of the same sort.

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.

The soul follows the progress of the body, as it does the progress of education.

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

Let us... take in our hands the staff of experience... To be blind and to think that one can do without this staff is the worst kind of blindness.

[E]ither everything is illusion, nature as well as revelation, or experience alone can explain faith.

[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.

If there is a revelation, it can not then contradict nature.

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.

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.

It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

Nothing is absolutely unjust. There is no real equity, no total grandeur, no pure vice, no absolute crime.