Top 716 Quotes & Sayings by Voltaire - Page 12

Antiquity is full of the praises of another antiquity still more remote.

Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him and to lose himself in his ideas.

I also know that we should cultivate our gardens.

He was not the greatest of men but he was the greatest of kings.

Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.

All the persecutors declare against each other mortal war, while the philosopher, oppressed by them all, contents himself with pitying them.

I never approved either the errors of his book, or the trivial truths he so vigorously laid down. I have, however, stoutly taken his side when absurd men have condemned him for these same truths.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

Learn to cultivate your own garden.

No one is ignorant that our character and turn of mind are intimately connected with the water-closet.

The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries.

Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.

The more estimable the offender, the greater the torment.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbor, it is because we have other means of making good cheer

They are mad men (Jews), but you should not burn them for that.

It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?

Nothing is more annoying than to be obscurely hanged.

If you want to kill Christianity you must abolish Sunday.

You write your name in the snow Yet say nothing.

For can anything be sillier than to insist on carrying a burden one would continually much rather throw to the ground?

The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.

A circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic.

This is no time to be making new enemies.

You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes. L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs

Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

What can I hope when all is right?

God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.

The abuse of grace is affectation, as the abuse of the sublime is absurdity; all perfection is nearly a fault.

Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them. -Francois

Let us help one another to bear our burdens.

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

Do you think... that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?

Before receiving your instruction, I must tell you what happened to me one day. I had just had a closet built at the end of my garden. I heard a mole arguing with a cockchafer; 'Here's a fine structure,' said the mole, 'it must have been a very powerful mole who did this work.' 'You're joking,' said the cockchafer; 'it's a cockchafer full of genius who is the architect of this building.' From that moment I resolved never to argue.

Excellently observed", answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden.

When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means, that is philosophy.

People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that such people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.

The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy.

When a man is in love, jealous, and just whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself.

Give me a few minutes to talk away my face and I can seduce the Queen of France.

Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.

The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

The way to become boring is to say everything.

In all the disputes which have excited Christians against each other, Rome has invariably decided in favor of that opinion which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect and the annihilation of the reasoning powers.

I swear that, not being able to be yours, I will belong to no one.

I confess that my stomach does not take to this style of cooking. I cannot accept calves sweetbreads swimming in a salty sauce, nor can I eat mince consisting of turkey, hare, and rabbit, which they try to persuade me comes from a single animal... As for the cooks, I really cannot be expected to put up with this ham essence, nor the excessive quantity of morels and other mushrooms, pepper, and nutmeg with which they disguise perfectly good food.

Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.

My life's dream has been a perpetual nightmare.

Los Padres have everything and the people have nothing; 'tis the masterpiece of reason and justice. For my part, I know nothing so divine as Los Padres who make war on Kings of Spain and Portugal and in Europe act as their confessors; who here kill Spaniards and at Madrid send them to Heaven.

It has taken seas of blood to drown the idol of despotism, but the English do not think they bought their laws too dearly.

Not all citizens can be equally strong; but they can all be equally free.

I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.

The best way to be boring is to include everything.

We are going to a new world... and no doubt it is there that everything is for the best; for it must be admitted that one might lament a little over the physical and moral happenings of our own world.

Luxury has been railed at for two thousand years, in verse and in prose, and it has always been loved.