Voltaire Quotes - Page 2

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire
The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
Voltaire
The most beautiful of all emblems is that of God whom Timaeus of Locris describes under the image of "A circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
Voltaire
If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.
Voltaire
If God made us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment.
Voltaire
God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
Voltaire
Pleasure is the object duty and the goal of all rational creatures.
Voltaire
If there were no God it would be necessary to invent him.
Voltaire
Shun idleness. It is a rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals.
Voltaire
He who thinks himself wise O heavens! is a great fool.
Voltaire
It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
Voltaire
Fear follows crime and is its punishment.
Voltaire
What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
Voltaire
Faith is believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.
Voltaire
The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.
Voltaire
Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?
Voltaire
The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.
Voltaire
The superfluous is very necessary.
Voltaire
Froth at the top dregs at bottom but the middle excellent.
Voltaire
England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.
Voltaire
My prayer to God is a very short one "Oh Lord make my enemies ridiculous!" God has granted it.
Voltaire
Doubt is not a pleasant state but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire
Fear succeeds crime - it is its punishment.
Voltaire
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
Voltaire
The world embarrasses me and I cannot dream That this watch exists and has no watchmaker.
Voltaire
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.
Voltaire
Providence has given us hope and sleep as a compensation for the many cares of life.
Voltaire
The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.
Voltaire
All the known world excepting only savage nations is governed by books.
Voltaire
The first step my son which one makes in the world is the one on which depends the rest of our days.
Voltaire
Ask a toad what is beauty? ... a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head a large flat mouth a yellow belly and a brown back.
Voltaire
Weakness on both sides is as we know the motto of all quarrels.
Voltaire
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Voltaire
Often the prudent far from making their destinies succumb to them.
Voltaire
Better is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
The best is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire
Writing is the painting of the voice.
Voltaire
And to every man has been assigned a good and an evil angel; one assisting him and the other annoying him, from his cradle to his coffin.
Voltaire
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
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?
Voltaire
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.
Voltaire
People will continue to commit atrocities as long as they believe in absurdities.
Voltaire
Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege.
Voltaire
Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)
Voltaire
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
Voltaire
And 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.
Voltaire
What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to our bosoms tillhe has gnawed into our hearts?
Voltaire
Having lived with kings, I have become a king in my own home.
Voltaire
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.
Voltaire
We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.
Voltaire
Imagine all contradictions, all possible incompatibilities--you will find them in the government, in the law-courts, in the churches, in the public shows of this droll nation.
Voltaire
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
Voltaire
At a great distance appeared with the same pomp the sheep of Thebes, the dog of Bubastis, the cat of Phoebe, the crocodile of Arsinoe, the goat of Mendes, and all the inferior gods of Egypt, who came to pay homage to the great ox, to the mighty Apis, as powerful as Isis, Osiris, and Horus, united together.In the midst of the demi-gods, forty priests carried an enormous basket, filled with sacred onions. These were, it is true, gods, but they resembled onions very much.("The White Bull")
Voltaire
It is fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions.
Voltaire
My dear young lady, when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there's no knowing what you may do.
Voltaire
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)
Voltaire
But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.''You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.
Voltaire
In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.
Voltaire
Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
Voltaire