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.

If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.

What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.

The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant.

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.

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.