Voltaire Quotes - Page 3

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
Voltaire
Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire
The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.
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He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend- provided of course he really is dead.
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It is proved...that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.
Voltaire
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God grante
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
It is not improbable that in hot countries, monkeys may have enslaved girls.
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If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.
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Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity.
Voltaire
In cities where peace and the arts flourish, men are more consumed by jealousy, worry, and anxiety than they are in cities under the blight of a besieging army. Private sorrows are more bitter than public suffering.
Voltaire
Perhaps, if I use my reason in good faith, I may suceed in discovering some ray of probability to lighten me in the dark night of nature. And if this faint dawn which I seek does not come to me, I shall be consoled to think that my ignorance is invincible; that knowledge which is forbidden me is assuredly useless to me; and that the great Being will not punish me for having sought a knowledge of him and failed to obtain it.
Voltaire
We are rarely proud when we are alone.
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An opportunity fordoing an injury happens a hundred times a day, hut for doing good not once a year," says Zoroaster.
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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.
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What's optimism? said Cacambo. Alas, said Candide, it is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.
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What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide."That is because I know what life is," said Martin.
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One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion
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Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.
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If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
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Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
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The best is the enemy of good.
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I've decided to be happy because it's good for my health.
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Fear follows crime and is its punishment.
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It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
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All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.
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If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciproc
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Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?
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It is dangerous to be right, when the government is wrong
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The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
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Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal.
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I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken.
Voltaire
The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.
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Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
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Shall I not render a service to men in speaking to them only of morality? This morality is so pure, so holy, so universal, so clear, so ancient, that it seems to come from God himself, like the light which we regard as the first of his works. Has he not given men self-love to secure their preservation; benevolence, beneficence, and virtue to control their self-love; the natural need to form a society; pleasure to enjoy, pain to warn us to enjoy in moderation, passions to spur us to great deeds, and wisdom to curb our passions? 
Voltaire
I do not know by what power I think; but well I know that I should never have thought without the assistance of my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent substances I do not at all doubt; but that it is impossible for God to communicate the faculty of thinking to matter, I doubt very much. I revere the Eternal Power, to which it would ill become me to prescribe bounds. I affirm nothing, and am contented to believe that many things are possible than are usually thought so".
Voltaire
Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.
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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.
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Men argue. Nature acts.
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Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.
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One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.
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I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.
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Quand celui à qui l'on parle ne comprend pas et celui qui parle ne se comprend pas, c'est de la métaphysiqueWhen he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics.
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The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
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But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?[Written after an earthquake in Lisbon killed over 15,000 people]
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Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.
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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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Injustice in the end produces independence.
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when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.
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Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.
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Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: "I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.
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Men employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.
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Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.
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A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough... [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.
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Tears are the silent language of grief.
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had no need of a guide to learn ignorance
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He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. "We do not pray to him at all," said the reverend sage. "We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.
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I tried to believe in God, but I confess to you that God meant nothing in my life, and that in my secret heart I too felt a void where my childhood faith had been. But probably this feeling belongs only to individuals in transition. The grandchildren of these pessimists will frolic in the freedom of their lives, and have more happiness than poor Christians darkened with fear of Hell.
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It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
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By what incomprehensible mechanism are our organs held in subjection to sentiment and thought? How is it that a single melancholy idea shall disturb the whole course of the blood; and that the blood should in turn communicate irregularities to the human understanding? What is that unknown fluid which certainly exists and which, quicker and more active than light, flies in less than the twinkling of an eye into all the channels of life,—produces sensations, memory, joy or grief, reason or frenzy,—recalls with horror what we would choose to forget; and renders a thinking animal, either a subject of admiration, or an object of pity and compassion?
Voltaire