Voltaire Quotes

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.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Let us help one another to bear our burdens.

Why, since we are always complaining of our ills, are we constantly employed in redoubling them?

He was not the greatest of men but he was the greatest of kings.

Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another.

What is not in nature can never be true.

A State can be no better than the citizens of which it is composed. Our labour now is not to mould States but make citizens.

It is with books as with the fires of our grates, everybody borrows a light from his neighbor to kindle his own, which in turn is communicated to others, and each partakes of all.

Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.

After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fe; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.

The women are never at a loss, God provides for them, let us run.

Love truth, and pardon error.

Persistence with patience and prayer pays with profits, prosperity and peace of mind.

Only your friends steal your books.

What! my lord," cried the fisherman, "and art thou then so unhappy, thou who bestowest favors?" "A hundred times more unhappy than thee," replied Zadig. "But how is it possible," said the good man, "that the giver can be more wretched than the receiver?" "Because," replied Zadig, "thy greatest misery arose from poverty, and mine is seated in the heart." "Did

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

Pangloss taught metaphysico-theologo-cosmonigology.

If we do not meet with agreeable things, we shall at least meet with something new.

In this country we find it pays to shoot an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

Changing a habit is hard work. But it's harder to find work that would be more fulfilling

In short, the alphabet was the origin of all man's knowledge, and of all his errors.

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

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

It is fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions.

We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age before we can rise above it.

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.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

It is the triumph of superior reason to live with folks who don't have any.

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

Those who think are excessively few; and those few do not set themselves to disturb the world.

It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love.

Pleasantry is never good on serious points, because it always regards subjects in that point of view in which it is not the purpose to consider them.

Philosopher: A lover of wisdom, which is to say, Truth.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

The most amazing and effective inventions are not those which do most honour to the human genius.

It requires ages to destroy a popular opinion.

But in this country it is necessary, now and then, to put one admiral to death in order to inspire the others to fight.

It is difficult to free people from the chains they revere.

Dare to think for yourself.

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

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

History is fables agreed upon.

In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.

We are going to a new world ... and no doubt it is there that everything is for the best; for it must be admitted that one might lament a little over the physical and moral happenings of our own world.

Come! you presence will either give me life or kill me with pleasure.

You guys, stop misattributing white nationalist quotes to me. Like, super seriously, it's not cool, dudes.

A woman can keep one secret the secret of her age.

What can we say with certainty?

Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.

What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of humanity. We are all fallible, let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right.

I shall relate quite simply how things happened and without adding anything of my own, which is no small feat for an historian.

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.

When thou eatest, give to the dogs, should they even bite thee.

In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.

A good cook is a certain slow poisoner, if you are not temperate.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.

Martin, perceiving some shelves filled with English books, said to the senator, "I fancy that a republican must be highly delighted with those books, which are most of them written with a noble spirit of freedom."
"It is noble to write as we think," said Pococurante; "it is the privilege of humanity. Throughout Italy we write only what we do not think; and the present inhabitants of the country of the Caesars and Antonines dare not acquire a single idea without the permission of a Dominican father. I should be enamored of the spirit of the English nation, did it not utterly frustrate the good effects it would produce by passion and the spirit of party."
Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think that author a great man.

"Who?" said Pococurante sharply; "that barbarian who writes a tedious commentary in ten books of rumbling verse, on the first chapter of Genesis? that slovenly imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation, by making the Messiah take a pair of compasses from
Heaven's armory to plan the world; whereas Moses represented the
Diety as producing the whole universe by his fiat? Can I think you have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso's Hell and the Devil; who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad, and at others into a
pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school–divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic i

Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.

Great men have all been formed either before academies or independent of them.

Nothing is more annoying than to be obscurely hanged.

Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.

What 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.

What! have you no monks who teach, who dispute, who govern, who cabal, and who burn people that are not of their opinion?

In France every man is either an anvil or a hammer; he is a beater or must be beaten.

Let us confess it: evil strides the world.

Religion, far from being beneficial food, turns to poison in infected brains.

God prefers bad verses recited with a pure heart to the finest verses chanted by the wicked.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

How many plays have been written in France?' Candide asked the abbe.
'Five or six thousand.'
'That's a lot,' said Candide. 'How many of them are good?'
'Fifteen or sixteen,' replied the abbe.
'That's a lot,' said Martin.

Pangloss most cruelly deceived me when he said that everything in the world is for the best.

Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

May God defend me from my friends: I can defend myself from my enemies.

Crush the infamous thing!

When we cannot use the compass of mathematics or the torch of experience ... it is certain we cannot take a single step forward.

Luxury has been railed at for two thousand years, in verse and in prose, and it has always been loved.

We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence

Isn't there a pleasure in criticising everything and discovering faults where other men detect beauties?

I envy animals for two things - their ignorance of evil to come, and their ignorance of what is said about them.

Opinion rules the world, but in the long run it is the philosophers who shape opinion

Go get yourself crucified and then rise on the third day.

The darkness is at its deepest. Just before the sunrise.

My friend, you see how perishable are the riches of this world; there is nothing solid but virtue,

What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research;
He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.

Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.

The Apology (of Socrates) is Plato's version of the speech given by Socrates as he defends himself against the charges of being a man "who corrupted the young, did not believe in the gods, and created new deities". "Apology" here has its earlier meaning (now usually expressed by the word "apologia") of speaking in defense of a cause or of one's beliefs or actions (from the Greek απολογία).

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

The heart has its own reasons that reason can't understand.

Inspiration: A peculiar effect of divine flatulence emitted by the Holy Spirit which hisses into the ears of a few chosen of God.

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

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

Happiness is a good that nature sells us.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

In this country [England] it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others. The reference is to Admiral John Byng, who was executed in 1757 for failing to prevent the French from taking Minorca.