Top 716 Quotes & Sayings by Voltaire - Page 8

Historians are gossips who tease the dead

Let us read, and let us dance — these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

We adore, we invoke, we seek to appease, only that which we fear.

It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.

What can we say with certainty?

In this country [England] it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. The reference is to Admiral John Byng, who was executed in 1757 for failing to prevent the French from taking Minorca.

Come! you presence will either give me life or kill me with pleasure.

my soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is its frame

The only way to compel men to speak good of us is to do it.

I have no morals, yet I am a very moral person

Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.

Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.

The man visited by ecstasies and visions, who takes dreams for realities is an enthusiast; the man who supports his madness with murder is a fanatic.

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

Men, generally going with the stream, seldom judge for themselves, and purity of taste is almost as rare as talent.

Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself.

Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.

It is reported in the supplement of the council of Nicæan that the fathers, being very perplexed to know which were the cryphal or apocryphal books of the Old and New Testaments, put them all pell-mell on an altar, and the books to be rejected fell to the ground. It is a pity that this eloquent procedure has not survived.

What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.

I also know that we must cultivate our garden. For when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born for rest.

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide.

Fanaticism, to which men are so much inclined, has always served not only to render them more brutalized but more wicked.

The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains.

Whatever you do, trample down abuses, and love those who love you. Different translation: Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing superstition, and love those who love you.

All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws

In France every man is either an anvil or a hammer; he is a beater or must be beaten.

I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.

We offer up prayers to god only because we have made him after our own image. We treat him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.

Minds differ still more than faces.

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.

Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.

The Deluge: A punishment inflicted on the human race by an all-knowing God, who, through not having foreseen the wickedness of men, repented of having made them, and drowned them once for all to make them better - an act which, as we all know, was accompanied by the greatest success.

As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.

It was decided by the university of Coimbre that the sight of several persons being slowly burned in great ceremony is an infallible secret for preventing earthquakes.

The way to be a bore is to say everything.

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence

We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good; we do the best we know.

If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.

The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.

It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

the women are never at a loss, God provides for them, let us run.

Let us cultivate our garden.

Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.

The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

A fool is a person who guesses and gets it wrong, a clever man is one who guesses, regardless of time period, and gets it right.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.

In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice.

The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion.

What will the preachers say? .. to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike.

All pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.

Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.

A small number of choice books are sufficient.

Work is often the father of pleasure.

Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.