What is toleration? It is the prerogative of humanity. We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors: Let us forgive one another's follies, it is the first law of nature.
VoltaireThis agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
VoltaireIt is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
VoltaireWoe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
VoltaireAnd ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.
VoltaireTwenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.
VoltaireThis self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.
VoltaireThe wicked can have only accomplices, the voluptuous have companions in debauchery, self-seekers have associates, the politic assemble the factions, the typical idler has connections, princes have courtiers. Only the virtuous have friends.
VoltaireTyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.
VoltaireThe art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.
VoltaireVirtue between men is a commerce of good actions: he who has no part in this commerce must not be reckoned.
VoltaireLet all the laws be clear, uniform and precise for interpreting laws is almost always to corrupt them.
VoltaireIt is the first law of friendship that it has to be cultivated. The second is to be indulgent when the first law is neglected.
VoltaireLife is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pass rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.
VoltaireWe offer up prayers to god only because we have made him after our own image. We treat him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.
VoltaireEvery sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror." "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." "Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense." "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
VoltaireIndividual misfortunes give rise to the general good; so that the more individual misfortunes exist, the more all is fine.
VoltaireIt is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.
VoltaireThe man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.
VoltaireWhat is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.
Voltaire