Quote by Pierre Bayle (2024)

FAQs

Quote by Pierre Bayle? ›

Pierre Bayle Quotes

1. “In matters of religion, it is very easy to deceive a man and very hard to undeceive him.” 2. “I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.”

Pierre Bayle was a seventeenth-century French skeptical philosopher and historian. He is best known for his encyclopedic work The Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697, 1^st edition; 1702, 2^nd edition), a work which was widely influential on eighteenth-century figures such as Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson.

The thoroughly rational position, Bayle seems to say repeatedly, is to reject the existence of the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He no less frequently asserts his belief in the tenets of the Calvinist faith in which he was raised, and for which, not incidentally, he made such sacrifice.

In the fifth book, Socrates' interlocutors ask him whether the state he is describing could ever exist in reality. He replies that this could only happen on one condition: Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy ...

Only fragments of his writings remain, one in which he says: Everything changes and nothing remains still; and you cannot step twice into the same stream. Heracl*tus' quote is perhaps best known through its interpretation in the dialogue “Cratylus” by Plato.

But in fact many Protestant as well as Catholic contemporaries considered him a highly suspect and 'atheistic' writer during, as well as immediately after, his own lifetime.

In the 17th century, the French philosopher Pierre Bayle proposed that although natural evil is undeniable, that doesn't challenge faith in God's love, power and wisdom. All that it challenges is the powers of human reason.

Currently, the consensus is that Pierre Bayle first translated the term in his journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in 1684. But there are some historians who disagree and some have gone so far as to say that its origin dates back to Plato's Republic.

[noun] dance; ball.

What were Voltaire's ideas? ›

Voltaire believed above all in the efficacy of reason. He believed social progress could be achieved through reason and that no authority—religious or political or otherwise—should be immune to challenge by reason. He emphasized in his work the importance of tolerance, especially religious tolerance.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the foremost thinkers of the Enlightenment. His comprehensive and systematic work in epistemology (the theory of knowledge), ethics, and aesthetics greatly influenced all subsequent philosophy, especially the various schools of Kantianism and idealism.

Among the thinkers of this period, those who defended tolerance were Milton (1608-1674), Bayle (1647-1706), Spinoza (1634-1677), and Locke (1632-1704).

Enlightenment thinkers similarly called for a separation of church and state—the idea that government should not interfere in religious affairs, and vice versa. Writers such as Voltaire were highly critical of religion's outsize influence in European policymaking.