Voltaire Quotes

It is only through timidity that states are lost.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

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

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work.

Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.

The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion.

The man who says to me, "Believe as I do, or God will damn you," will presently say, "Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you."

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics.

You see, Mademoiselle, I have experience, I know the world. To pass the time, why don't you ask every passenger to tell you his life's story? And if there is a single one among them who has never cursed his life, who has not often told himself that he was the unhappiest of men, then you may throw me overboard, headfirst!

All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred millions of worlds around a million of stars, the activity of light, the life of all animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles.

What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.

Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

Alas...I too have known love, that ruler of hearts, that soul of our soul: it's never brought me anything except one kiss and twenty kicks in the rump. How could such a beautiful cause produce such an abominable effect on you?

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.

We must cultivate our own garden.

Fanaticism, to which men are so much inclined, has always served not only to render them more brutalized but more wicked.

My life is a struggle.

I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.

Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. But what shall we substitute in its place? you say. What? A ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my relatives. I tell you to rid yourselves of this beast, and you ask me what you shall put in its place ?

Earth is an insane asylum, to which the other planets deport their lunatics.

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero.

Let us read, and let us dance — these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice.

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

No one is ignorant that our character and turn of mind are intimately connected with the water-closet.

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

Will is wish, and liberty is power.

A historian has many duties... the first is not to slander; the second is not to bore

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

If the bookseller happens to desire a privilege for his merchandise, whether he is selling Rabelais or the Fathers of the Church, the magistrate grants the privilege without answering for the contents of the book. - Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.

I serve your Beaune to my friends, but your Volnay I keep for myself.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

The only way to compel men to speak good of us is to do it.

We only half live when we only half think.

History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.

All the arts are brothers; each one is a light to the others.

He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. "We do not pray to him at all," said the reverend sage. "We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.

Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him and to lose himself in his ideas.

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.