Pierre Bayle Quotes on Knowledge
Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), the Huguenot exile whose Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697, expanded 1702) would shape the Enlightenment more than any other single work, gave late-seventeenth-century philosophy its most ambitious skeptical compendium. The Dictionary's long footnotes systematically juxtapose the strongest available arguments on every side of the major philosophical and theological controversies, with the apparent effect of leaving each issue unresolved and the reader in a state of philosophical suspension that Bayle's fideist sincerity, or his ironic detachment from religious orthodoxy, has remained a matter of dispute ever since. The work was the principal Enlightenment quarry for Voltaire, Hume, and Diderot.
Quotes
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Attributed to Pierre Bayle:
“Doubt about everything that is not self-evident is the beginning of philosophy.”
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Attributed to Pierre Bayle:
“The most general infirmity of mankind is its credulity.”
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“... l'exactitude de citer. C'est un talent plus rare que l'on ne pense.”
Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697; rev. 1702) art. "Remarques". Epigraph in W. F. H. King (ed.) Classical and Foreign Quotations , 2nd ed. (1889) title page -
“Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697; rev. 1702) art. "Remarques". Epigraph in W. F. H. King (ed.) Classical and Foreign Quotations , 2nd ed. (1889) title page”
... l'exactitude de citer. C'est un talent plus rare que l'on ne pense. -
“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.”
Reply to the Questions of a Provincial ( Réponse aux questions d'un provincial , 1703). Quoted in Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle , trans. Denys Potts (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 61