Quotes by Victor Cousin

All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.

Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice.

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.

We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake - the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.

All men have an equal right to the free development of their faculties; they have an equal right to the impartial protection of the state; but it is not true, it is against all the laws of reason and equity, it is against the eternal nature of things, that the indolent man and the laborious man, the spendthrift and the economist, the imprudent and the wise, should obtain and enjoy an equal amount of goods.