Pierre Bayle quotes

It is thus tolerance that is the source of peace, and intolerance that is the source of disorder and squabbling. (Pierre Bayle)
The antiquity and general acceptance of an opinion is not assurance of its truth.
Pierre Bayle
It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.
Pierre Bayle
Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.
Pierre Bayle
There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.
Pierre Bayle
I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.
Pierre Bayle
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.
Pierre Bayle
I am a good Protestant, and in the full sense of the term, for from the bottom of my soul, I protest against everything that is said, and everything that is done.
Pierre Bayle
If the Multiplicity of Religions prejudices the State, it proceeds from their not bearing with one another but on the contrary endeavouring each to crush and destroy the other by methods of Persecution. In a word, all the Mischief arises not from Toleration, but from the want of it.
Pierre Bayle
There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.
Pierre Bayle