Voltaire Quotes

Men argue. Nature acts. ~ Voltaire

As to his religious notions - why, as Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep if administered with a certain quantity of arsenic. ~ George Eliot

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions. ~ Voltaire

Voltaire rejects all systems, and suspects that "every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack."

"The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women."

"It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will."

"Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one. ~ Will Durant

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. ~ Voltaire

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction. ~ Voltaire

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

Let us therefore reject all superstition in order to become more human; but in speaking against fanaticism, let us not imitate the fanatics: they are sick men in delirium who want to chastise their doctors. Let us assuage their ills, and never embitter them, and let us pour drop by drop into their souls the divine balm of toleration, which they would reject with horror if it were offered to them all at once. ~ Voltaire

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd. ~ Voltaire

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 ? ~ Voltaire

It was Voltaire who said that 'in a government, you need both shepherds and butchers.' The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds, while the sheep turned cannibal. ~ Stephen Clarke

Time is man's most precious asset. All men neglect it; all regret the loss of it; nothing can be done without it. ~ Voltaire

Oh! what a superior man," said Candide below his breath. "What a great genius is this Pococurante! Nothing can please him. ~ Voltaire

That is why all romantics are anti-Voltairean, even Michelet, whose political fervor ought to have made him stand aligned with Voltaire; and that is why, on the other hand, all the minds which accept the world and recognize its irony and indifference are Voltairean. ~ Voltaire

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do. ~ Richard Dawkins

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! ~ Voltaire

All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity that he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton has more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called "tinny". It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books. ~ C.S. Lewis

Despots govern by terror. They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage. ~ Edmund Burke

Everything can be borne except contempt. ~ Voltaire

Upon such slender threads as these do the fates of mortals hang ~ Voltaire

Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. ~ Norman Davies

A Frenchman who arrives in London, will find philosophy, like everything else, very much changed there. He had left the world a plenum, and he now finds it a vacuum. ~ Voltaire

Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient. ~ Voltaire

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon ~ Voltaire

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow. ~ Voltaire

History never repeats itself. Man always does. ~ Voltaire

Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons. ~ Voltaire

Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal. ~ Voltaire

People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy - I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as "realists of a larger reality" because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

....

Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people ha ~ Ada Palmer

The prudent man does himself good; the virtuous one does it to other men. ~ Voltaire

Wine is the divine juice of September. ~ Voltaire

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

The famous physician Dumoulin said when dying, 'I leave two great physicians behind me, simple food and pure water.' ~ Voltaire

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. ~ Voltaire

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

had no need of a guide to learn ignorance ~ Voltaire

Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The ~ Tom Reiss

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

Shun idleness. It is rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals. ~ Voltaire

Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying? ~ Voltaire

we often meet with those whom we expected never to see more; ~ Voltaire

To really enjoy pleasures, you must know how to leave them. ~ Voltaire

We are all guilty of the good we did not do ~ Voltaire

A good imitation is the most perfect originality ~ Voltaire

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

You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real. ~ David Lee Roth

Wherever there is a settled society, religion is necessary; the laws cover manifest crimes, and religion covers secret crimes. ~ Voltaire

How many things here do I not want (Voltaire when in London. ~ Voltaire

Aidan: "From the moment I laid eyes on her she was trouble to my concentration, my libido, and my mental health. After six weeks of pursuit, I'd trapped her between my upraised arms against a book case, somewhere betwixt Shakespeare and Voltaire. "I want the witchcraft in your lips," I'd whispered. Instead of arguing, she grabbed me by the ears. She'd been soft lips, liberal tongue and nipping teeth. I'd contributed a willing body and a vulgar groan. She'd drawn away, licked her lips and ducked underneath my arms. When she was about three yards from me, she's tilted her head up like a siren on the bow of a ship and pursed a devil-may-care smile at me before she bowed. She'd challenged me to pursue her, and I'd intended to, but when I pushed off, the bookcase fell backwards. I tumbled into a heap of literary tombs. I could still hear her laughing when the library's elevator door chimed closed. ~ Elizabeth Marx

The 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. ~ Voltaire

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time. ~ Voltaire

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. ~ Voltaire

Stand upright, speak thy thoughts, declare The truth thou hast, that all may share; Be bold, proclaim it everywhere: They only live who dare. ~ Voltaire

If we would destroy the Christian religion, we must first of all destroy man's belief in the Bible. ~ Voltaire

An almost infallible means of saving yourself from the desire of self-destruction is always to have something to do.
Creech, the commentator on Lucretius, marked upon his manuscripts: "N. B. Must hang myself when I have finished." He kept his word with himself that he might have the pleasure of ending like his author. If he had undertaken a commentary upon Ovid he would have lived longer. ~ Voltaire

There are two things for which animals are to be envied: they know nothing of future evils, or of what people say about them. ~ Voltaire

You write your name in the snow Yet say nothing. ~ Voltaire

To have preferences, but not exclusions. ~ Voltaire

We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly. ~ Voltaire

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity. ~ Voltaire

In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice. ~ Voltaire

There are certain men who are sacrosanct in history; you touch on the truth of them at your peril. These are such men as Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, Martel and Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor and William of Falaise, St. Louis and Richard and Tancred, Erasmus and Bacon, Galileo and Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau, Harvey and Darwin, Nelson and Wellington. In America, Penn and Franklin, Jefferson and Jackson and Lee. There are men better than these who are not sacrosanct, who may be challenged freely. But these men may not be. Albert Pike has been elevated to this sacrosanct company, though of course to a minor rank. To challenge his rank is to be overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse, and we challenge him completely.

Looks are important to these elevated. Albert Pike looked like Michelangelo's Moses in contrived frontier costume. Who could distrust that big man with the great beard and flowing hair and godly glance?
If you dislike the man and the type, then he was pompous, empty, provincial and temporal, dishonest, and murderous. But if you like the man and the type, then he was impressive, untrammeled, a man of the right place and moment, flexible or sophisticated, and firm.
These are the two sides of the same handful of coins.
He stole (diverted) Indian funds and used them to bribe doubtful Indian leaders. He ordered massacres of women and children (exemplary punitive operations). He lied ~ R.A. Lafferty

Everywhere the weak execrate the powerful, before whom they cringe; and the powerful beat them like sheep whose wool and flesh they sell. ~ Voltaire

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

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

He is lifeless that is faultless. ~ Voltaire

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

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

I have wanted to kill myself a million times,
but somehow I am still in love with life. ~ Voltaire

Friends should be preferred to kings. ~ Voltaire

Descartes gave sight to the blind. These saw the errors of antiquity and of the sciences. The path he struck out is since become boundless [ ... ] In fathoming this abyss no bottom has been found. We are now to examine what discoveries Sir Isaac Newton has made in it. ~ Voltaire

But he had been the victim of the world's most common crime - his youth had been kidnapped by a thing called time. It had likely also been raped, dismembered, and buried somewhere never to be seen again ~ Aurelio Voltaire

Your destiny is that of a man, your vows those of a god. ~ Voltaire

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

What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on ... ~ Voltaire

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

If Columbus in an island of America had not caught the disease, which poisons the source of generation, and often indeed prevents generation, we should not have chocolate and cochineal ~ Voltaire

Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had with French literature. And none, of course, could have known in advance that the 1830s and '40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, not to say anything of Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music. ~ David McCullough

Prejudice is an opinion without judgment. ~ Voltaire

Voltaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau ... established a new connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast release of energy. The sun was reborn to man and so was the moon. To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Hope should no more be a virtue than fear; we fear and we hope, according to what is promised or threatened us. ~ Voltaire

Voltaire noted in 1763: The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

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. ~ Voltaire

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

Everything happens through immutable laws, ... everything is necessary ... There are, some persons say, some events which are necessary and others which are not. It would be very comic that one part of the world was arranged, and the other were not; that one part of what happens had to happen and that another part of what happens did not have to happen. If one looks closely at it, one sees that the doctrine contrary to that of destiny is absurd; but there are many people destined to reason badly; others not to reason at all others to persecute those who reason. ~ Voltaire

Did you hear that
did you have any choice about whether to hear it ~ Voltaire

They could not help loving anything that made them laugh. The Lisbon earthquake was "embarrassing to the physicists and humiliating to theologians" (Barbier). It robbed Voltaire of his optimism. In the huge waves which engulfed the town, in the chasms which opened underneath it, in volcanic flames which raged for days in the outskirts, some 50,000 people perished. But to the courtiers of Louis XV it was an enormous joke. M. de Baschi, Madame de Pompadour's brother-in-law, was French Ambassador there at the time. He saw the Spanish Ambassador killed by the arms of Spain, which toppled onto his head from the portico of his embassy; Baschi then dashed into the house and rescued his colleague's little boy whom he took, with his own family, to the country. When he got back to Versailles he kept the whole Court in roars of laughter for a week with his account of it all. "Have you heard Baschi on the earthquake? ~ Nancy Mitford

There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: 'he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anyone.' But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such as one was Descartes. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other's throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace ~ Voltaire

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year. ~ Voltaire

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other. ~ Feist

Doubt is not a very agreeable status, but certainty is a ridiculous one. ~ Voltaire

Writing is the painting of the voice. ~ Voltaire

Among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solutions to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise ... The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application. ~ Voltaire

Love has various lodgings; the same word does not always signify the same thing. ~ Voltaire

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero. ~ Voltaire

I have told myself a hundred times that I should be happy if I were as brainless as my neighbor, and yet I do not desire such happiness.1 - Voltaire ~ Frederic Lenoir

this is how men treat one another. ~ Voltaire

An admiral should be put to death now and then to encourage the others. ~ Voltaire

The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity. ~ Voltaire