Auguste Comte Quotes

“Morality was supreme because it joined male and female characteristics. Blending the best characteristics of both sexes and the 'opposite' races - the characteristics of intelligence and compassion - Comte claimed the legitimacy to act as the spokesperson for the collective being Humanity and to regenerate society. As a completely unified and moral person, he could create within society the solidarity necessary for progress. In a way, he was challenging the two androgynes who had captured the imagination of his contemporaries: Joan of Arc and George Sand. Comte appeared to heed the words of a feminist journal. La Voix des Femmes, which proclaimed in 1848 that 'Woman must ... emancipate man by making him a woman.”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume III

“In truth, Comte did not have much regard for literary culture. Chairs of literature and literary associations would be suppressed in the positivist era. He even seemed to discourage writing and reading anything after one's formal education was completed. A 'veritable positivist' - even a positivist priest - should reduce his library to one hundred volumes. Half of that library would be 'more historic than dogmatic' and thus would have 'little need to be reread.' People should read chiefly great poets pondering the human condition to enlarge their understanding. In the Catéchisme, he maintained that there were only thirteen great writers: Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Caldéron, Corneille, Milton, Molière, Thomas à Kempis, Cervantes, and Walter Scott. There were perhaps another seven writers worth reading. Almost all the works of the others could be destroyed as harmful to the heart and mind, although he did allow for some of these works to be preserved as historical documents. At one point, Comte went so far as to announce that 'all of human knowledge' could be condensed into ten volumes. Moral activity now was most important to him”
― Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume III