Thomas Hobbes Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Thomas Hobbes with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
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“All society therefore is either for gain, or for glory;”
Meaning & context
Hobbes provocatively explains association through self-interest and reputation, setting up his argument about fear, power and the political conditions needed for lasting society.
Source details
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, Chapter I, represented in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Project Gutenberg #73906. 'All society therefore is either for gain, or for glory' appears inside Hobbes's seventeenth-century argument from appetite, glory and self-interest; it is political anthropology/philosophy, not a modern empirical law of all relationships.
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“The end of knowledge is power;”
Meaning & context
Hobbes defines philosophical inquiry by practical use: knowledge of causes matters because it enables people to produce effects and accomplish things.
Source details
Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore / Elements of Philosophy, Part I, Chapter I, section 6, represented in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, Project Gutenberg #73877. 'The end of knowledge is power' is immediately developed through the use of theorems for construction and action; it remains Hobbes's seventeenth-century account of philosophy's utility.
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“and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Meaning & context
Hobbes describes the insecurity he believes follows where there is no common authority capable of restraining conflict and enforcing peace.
Source details
Leviathan, Part I, Chapter XIII, Project Gutenberg #3207. “And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” closes Hobbes’s list of consequences in the hypothetical condition where there is no common power able to keep people in awe. It remains a seventeenth-century political-philosophy argument about the state of nature, not a blanket empirical description of ordinary social life.