Does anyone really know where they're going to?

Philosophy is as far separated from impiety as religion is from fanaticism.

It seems to me that if one had kept silence up to now regarding religion, people would still be submerged in the most grotesque and dangerous superstition ... regarding government, we would still be groaning under the bonds of feudal government ... regarding morals, we would still be having to learn what is virtue and what is vice. To forbid all these discussions, the only ones worthy of occupying a good mind, is to perpetuate the reign of ignorance and barbarism.

What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days.

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.

Does not vanity itself cease to be blamable, is it not even ennobled, when it is directed to laudable objects, when it confines itself to prompting us to great and generous actions?

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.