Voltaire Quotes
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The perfect is the enemy of the good.
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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.
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It is fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions
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Go get yourself crucified and then rise on the third day.
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It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.
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Our priests are not what a silly populace supposes; all their learning consists in our credulity.
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He who thinks himself wise, O heavens! is a great fool.
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The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.
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Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
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I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.
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All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws
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The more often a stupidity is repeated, the more it gets the appearance of wisdom.
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The way to become boring is to say everything.
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Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.
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Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.
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I know of no great men except those who have rendered great service to the human race.
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The effervescence of this fresh wine reveals the true brilliance of the French people.
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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.
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The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.
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Let us help one another to bear our burdens.
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All pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.
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I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?
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What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?
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The darkness is at its deepest. Just before the sunrise.
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The atheists are for the most part imprudent and misguided scholars who reason badly who, not being able to understand the Creation, the origin of evil, and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis the eternity of things and of inevitability.
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We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age before we can rise above it.
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The best is the enemy of the good.
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A good imitation is the most perfect originality
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It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
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I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.
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