I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms.

The Bible. That is what fools have written, what imbeciles commend, what rogues teach and young children are made to learn by heart.

Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him. ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.

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.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.

Every one goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.