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The collection / 566 fragments

Justice.

Explore passages mentioning justice, just. Topic suggestions use transparent word matching, not scholarly classification. Editorial meanings and lexical matches are discovery aids, not independent authentication of a quotation.

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01c. 1486 AD
Cornelius Celsus: Knowledge is the supreme good, the supreme evil is physical pain. We are composed of two separate parts, the soul and the the body; the soul is the greater of these two, the body the lesser. Knowledge appertains to the greater part, the supreme evil belongs to the lesser and baser part. Knowledge is an excellent thing for the mind, and pain is the most grievous thing for the body. Just as the supreme evil is physical pain, so is wisdom the supreme good of the soul, that is to say of the wise man, and no other thing can be compared with it.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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05c. 1486 AD
Although time is included among continuous quantities, being indivisible and immaterial it does not altogether fall into the scope of geometry,—by which it is divided into figures and bodies of infinite variety, which are seen to be continuous inasmuch as they are visible and material,—but it agrees only with its first principles, i.e. with the point and the line; the point in time may be compared to an instant, and the line to the length of a certain quantity of time. Just as the point is the beginning and end of a line, so is an instant the beginning and end of any given space of time; and just as a line is infinitely divisible, so can a given space of time be likewise divided, and as the divisions of the line are in proportion to each other, so likewise are the divisions of time.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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09c. 1486 AD
Because writers have had no knowledge of the science of painting, they have not been able to describe its gradations and parts, and since painting itself does not reveal itself nor its artistic work in words, it has remained, owing to ignorance, behind the sciences mentioned above, but it has thereby lost nothing of its divinity. And truly it is not without reason that men have failed to honour it, because it does honour to itself without the aid of the speech of others, just as do the excellent works of nature. And if the painters have not described the art of painting, and reduced it to a science, the fault must not be imputed to painting and it is no less noble on that account, since few painters profess a knowledge of letters, as their life would not be long enough for them to acquire such knowledge. Therefore we ask, Is the virtue of herbs, stones and plants non-existent because men have been ignorant of it? Certainly not; but we will say that these herbs remained noble in themselves without the aid of human tongues or letters.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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10c. 1486 AD
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow, and the proportion is the same between poetry and painting. Because poetry produces its results in the imagination of the reader, and painting produces them in a concrete reality outside the eye, so that the eye receives its images just as if they were the works of nature; and poetry produces its results without images, and they do not pass to the brain through the channel of the visual faculty, as in painting.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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11c. 1486 AD
A spherical body which possesses a dense and resisting superficies will move as much in the rebound resulting from the resistance of a smooth and solid plane as it would if you threw it freely through the air, if the force applied be equal in both cases. Oh, admirable justice of thine, thou first mover! thou hast not permitted that any tone should fail to produce its necessary effects, either as regards order or quantity. Seeing that a force impels an object which it overcomes a distance of one hundred arms' length, and if in obeying this law it meets with resistance, thou hast ordained that the force of the shock will cause afresh a further movement, which in its various bounds recuperates the whole sum of the distance it should have travelled. And if you measure the distance accomplished by the aforesaid bounds you will find that they equal the length of distance through which a similar object set in motion by an equal force would travel freely through the air.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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13c. 1486 AD
The water which rises in the mountains is the blood which keeps the mountain alive, and through this conduit or vein, nature, the helper of her creatures, prompt in the desire to repair the loss of the moisture expended, proffers the desired aid abundantly; just as in a stricken spot in man you will see, owing to the aid which is brought, the blood abound under the skin in a swelling, so as to succour the spot which has been stricken; likewise, in the case of the vine, when it is cut at its extremity, nature causes its moisture to rise from the lowest root to the end of the extremity which has been cut, and when this moisture has been expended nature ceases not to supply it with vital moisture to the end of its life.
Leonardo da Vinci / quote
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15c. 1872 AD
Customs and Beauty.—In justice to custom it must not be overlooked that, in the case of all those who conform to it whole-heartedly from the very start, the organs of attack and defence, both physical and intellectual, begin to waste away; i.e. these individuals gradually become more beautiful! For it is the exercise of these organs and their corresponding feelings that brings about ugliness and helps to preserve it. It is for this reason that the old baboon is uglier than the young one, and that the young female baboon most closely resembles man, and is hence the most handsome.—Let us draw from this our own conclusions as to the origin of female beauty!
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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16c. 1872 AD
The Historical Refutation as the Decisive One.—Formerly it was sought to prove that there was no God—now it is shown how the belief that a God existed could have originated, and by what means this belief gained authority and importance: in this way the counterproof that there is no God becomes unnecessary and superfluous.—In former times, when the “evidences of the existence of God” which had been brought forward were refuted, a doubt still remained, viz. whether better proofs could not be found than those which had just been refuted: at that time the atheists did not understand the art of making a tabula rasa.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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17c. 1872 AD
To the Admirers of Objectiveness.—He who, as a child, has observed in his parents and acquaintances in the midst of whom he has grown up, certain varied and strong feelings, with but little subtle discernment and inclination for intellectual justice, and has therefore employed his best powers and his most precious time in imitating these feelings, will observe in himself when he arrives at years of discretion that every new thing or man he meets with excites in him either sympathy or aversion, envy or contempt. Under the domination of this experience, which he is powerless to shake off, he admires neutrality of feeling or “objectivity” as an extraordinary thing, as something connected with genius or a very rare morality, and he cannot believe that even this neutrality is merely the product of education and habit.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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18c. 1872 AD
Cause and Effect.—On this mirror—and our intellect is a mirror—something is going on that indicates regularity: a certain thing is each time followed by another certain thing. When we perceive this and wish to give it a name, we call it cause and effect,—fools that we are! as if in this we had understood or could understand anything! For, of course, we have seen nothing but the images of causes and effects, and it is just this figurativeness which renders it impossible for us to see a more substantial relation than that of sequence!
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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19c. 1872 AD
Dreaming and Responsibility.—You would wish to be responsible for everything except your dreams! What miserable weakness, what lack of logical courage! Nothing contains more of your own work than your dreams! Nothing belongs to you so much! Substance, form, duration, actor, spectator—in these comedies you act as your complete selves! And yet it is just here that you are afraid and ashamed of yourselves, and even Oedipus, the wise Oedipus, derived consolation from the thought that we cannot be blamed for what we dream. From this I must conclude that the great majority of men must have some dreadful dreams to reproach themselves with. If it were otherwise, to how great an extent would these nocturnal fictions have been exploited in the interests of man's pride! Need I add that the wise Oedipus was right, that we are really not responsible for our dreams any more than for our waking hours, and that the doctrine of free will has as its parents man's pride and sense of power! Perhaps I say this too often; but that does not prove that it is not true.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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21c. 1872 AD
At the Parting of the Ways.—Shame! You wish to form part of a system in which you must be a wheel, fully and completely, or risk being crushed by wheels! where it is understood that each one will be that which his superiors make of him! where the seeking for “connections” will form part of one's natural duties! where no one feels himself offended when he has his attention drawn to some one with the remark, “He may be useful to you some time”; where people do not feel ashamed of paying a visit to ask for somebody's intercession, and where they do not even suspect that by such a voluntary submission to these morals, they are once and for all stamped as the common pottery of nature, which others can employ or break up of their free will without feeling in any way responsible for doing so,—just as if one were to say, “People of my type will never be lacking, therefore, do what you will with me! Do not stand on ceremony!”
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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22c. 1872 AD
To those who Dream of Immortality.—So you desire the everlasting perpetuity of this beautiful consciousness of yourselves? Is it not shameful? Do you forget all those other things which would in their turn have to support you for all eternity, just as they have borne with you up to the present with more than Christian patience? Or do you think that you can inspire them with an eternally pleasant feeling towards yourself? A single immortal man on earth would imbue everyone around him with such a disgust for him that a general epidemic of murder and suicide would be brought about. And yet, ye petty dwellers on earth, with your narrow conceptions of a few thousand little minutes of time, ye would wish to be an everlasting burden on this everlasting universal existence! Could anything be more impertinent? After all, however, let us be indulgent towards a being of seventy years: he has not been able to exercise his imagination in conceiving his own “eternal tediousness”—he had not time enough for that!
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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24c. 1872 AD
To deal like an Artist with One's Weaknesses.—If we must positively have weaknesses and come in the end to look upon them as laws beyond ourselves, I wish that everybody may be possessed of as much artistic capacity as will enable him to set off his virtues by means of his weaknesses, and to make us, through his weaknesses, desirous of acquiring his virtues: a power which great musicians have possessed in quite an exceptional degree. How frequently do we notice in Beethoven's music a coarse, dogmatic, and impatient tone; in Mozart, the joviality of an honest man, whose heart and mind have not overmuch to give us; in Richard Wagner, an abrupt and aggressive restlessness, in the midst of which, just as the most patient listener is on the point of losing his temper, the composer regains his powers, and likewise the others. Through their very weaknesses, these musicians have created in us an ardent desire for their virtues, and have given us a palate which is ten times more sensitive to every note of this tuneful intellect, tuneful beauty, and tuneful goodness.
Friedrich Nietzsche / quote
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