Voltaire Quotes

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

Men argue. Nature acts.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

Let each of us boldly and honestly say: How little it is that I really know!

I hold firmly to my original views. After all I am a philosopher.

The Jews are of all peoples the grosses, the most ferocious, the most fanatical, and the most absurd.

Whosoever does not know how to recognize the faults of great men is incapable of estimating their perfections.

To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.

A lady of honor may be raped once, but it strengthens her virtue.

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.

The best way to be boring is to include everything.

Let us cultivate our garden.

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.

The man visited by ecstasies and visions, who takes dreams for realities is an enthusiast; the man who supports his madness with murder is a fanatic.

Ideas are like beards; men do not have them until they grow up.

I have no morals, yet I am a very moral person

Nature has always had more force than education.

All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.

We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.

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

How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! how horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite.

Villains are undone by what is worst in them, heroes by what is best.

Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness.

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.)

It is only through timidity that states are lost.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

Common sense is both more rare and more desirable in leaders than mere intelligence.

It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.

If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

The best is the enemy of the good.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

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

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

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

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity.

Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.

I acknowledge that four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is.

There can be no happiness without good health

A good imitation is the most perfect originality

I have chosen to be happy because it is goo for my health.

I also know that we must cultivate our garden. For when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born for rest.

Minds differ still more than faces.