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.

Better is the enemy of good.

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

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing.

Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding.

I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.