Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke famous quotes

03-18-2025

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Taken #Writing #Men
It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Art #Mistake #Men
I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some men and some other animals.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Distance #Animal #Men
As well as might we say that a ship is built, loaded and manned for the sake of any particular pilot, instead of acknowledging that the pilot is made for the sake of the ship, her lading, and her crew, who are always the owners in the political vessel; as to say that kingdoms were instituted for kings, not kings for kingdoms.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Kings #History #Political
Indifference must be a crime in us, to be ranked but one degree below treachery; for deserting the commonwealth is next to betraying it.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Degrees #Apathy #Next
It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Real #Discovery #Progress
I have read somewhere or other,-in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think,-that history is philosophy teaching by examples.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Philosophy #Teaching #Thinking
The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Art #Political #Causes
History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Philosophy #Teaching #History
Worry is the only insupportable misfortune of life.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Worry #Misfortunes
Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; and the knowledge we acquire by it only a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more.
-- Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

#Ignorance #Men #Citizens

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