Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778)
A witty saying proves nothing.
Animals have these advantages over man: They have no theologians to instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
Common sense is not so common.
Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.
Doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd.
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.
History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead.
History supplies little more than a list of people who have helped themselves with the property of others.
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him. But all nature cries aloud that He does exist; that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence upon it.
If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?
It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part, the rest are lost in the multitude.
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.
Love truth, but pardon error.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Men who seek happiness are like drunkards who can never find their house but are sure that they have one.
Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
Paradise is where I am.
Physicians pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into humans of which they know nothing.
Prejudice is the reason of fools.
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
The English people are like the English beer. Froth on top, dregs at the bottom, the middle excellent.
The great consolation in life is to say precisely what one thinks.
The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.
There has never been a perfect government, because men have passions; and if they did not have passions, there would be no need for government.
Those who can make you believe in absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.
To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
Virtue debases in justifying itself.
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
When it is a question of money all men are of the same religion.
Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.
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