History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.

How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! how horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite.

Everyone places his good where he can and has as much of it as he can, in his own way.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

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 only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.

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