Voltaire Quotes

Indolence is sweet, and its consequences bitter.

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

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

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity.

A good imitation is the most perfect originality

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

History is fables agreed upon.

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

There can be no happiness without good health

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

If it's too silly to be said, it can always be sung.

He was my equal in beauty, a paragon of grace and charm, sparkling with wit, and burning with love. I adored him to distraction, to the point of idolatry: I loved him as one can never love twice.

Fame is a heavy burden.

The prudent man does himself good; the virtuous one does it to other men.

Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise for interpreting laws is almost always to corrupt them.

If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.

Come! you presence will either give me life or kill me with pleasure.

We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.

You are very harsh.' 'I have seen the world.

We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good; we do the best we know.

Wine is the divine juice of September.

A small number of choice books are sufficient.

Men are in general so tricky, so envious, and so cruel that when we find one who is only weak, we are too happy.

Fear could never make virtue.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Everything can be borne except contempt.

He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.

If there are atheists, who is to be blamed if not the mercenary tyrants of souls who, in revolting us against their swindles, compel some feeble spirits to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?

Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.

Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

I have wanted to kill myself a million times, but somehow I am still in love with life.

Mortals are equal; their mask differs.

Love has various lodgings; the same word does not always signify the same thing.

He who has heard the same thing told by 12,000 eye-witnesses has only 12,000 probabilities, which are equal to one strong probability, which is far from certain.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.

Let us confess it: evil strides the world.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

The monster, fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.