Voltaire Famous Quotes

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable.

In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

This may sound somewhat obvious but, as the French philosopher Voltaire once famously pointed out, the main problem with common sense is that it is not so common.

Idiots admire everything by a famous and respected author. I just read for myself, and only like what I found useful.

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

Among some of the famous men educated by the Jesuits we find Bossuet, Corneille, Molière, Tasso, Fontenelle, Diderot, Voltaire, and Bourdaloue, himself a Jesuit.

Famously reversing Voltaire’s dictum, ‘if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’, Bakunin declared, ‘if God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him’.

For I showed men how they were the cause of their own unhappiness and, in consequence, how they might avoid it’, writes Rousseau to Voltaire in his famous letter on the Lisbon disaster, laying the foundations of a new spirit that desacralizes nature, removing it from divine will and entrusting it to the hands of man.

Frederick II of Prussia (known as “the Great,” reigned 1740–1786) famously ran his Berlin court—and the associated Academy of Sciences—in French. When Voltaire visited in 1750, he wrote to the Marquis de Thibouville that “I find myself here in France. One speaks only our language. German is for the soldiers and for the horses; it is only necessary on the road.”187f

One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: “There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!” Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play,

This new turn of events prompted them to philosophize more than ever. There lived in the vicinity a famous dervish who was known as the best philosopher in Turkey; they went to consult him. Acting as their spokesman, Pangloss said to the dervish, “Sir, we've come to ask you why such a strange animal as man was ever created.” “Why are you concerned about that?” said the dervish. “Is it any of your business?” “But, Reverend Father,” said Candide, “there's a terrible amount of evil in the world.” “What does it matter whether there's evil or good?” said the dervish. “When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry about whether the mice in it are comfortable?” “Then what ought we to do?” asked Pangloss. “Keep quiet,” said the dervish.

He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15

French philosopher Voltaire once famously pointed out, the main problem with common sense is that it is not so common.

Another key philosopher was the ever-popular Voltaire (1694-1778) who used his literary skill to write plays, poems, novels, essays, and reams of letters that expressed his philosophical beliefs to the masses. Voltaire was extremely critical of the dogmatic nature of the Catholic Church and constantly campaigned for the separation of the French state and church. An advocate of freedom of expression and critic of all religious institutions, Voltaire’s work was frequently censored, but in his writing, he often used satire to mask his true beliefs, as in his most famous work, Candide.

It was, after all, Voltaire who was reputed to be the source of the famous quip that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him, if only because, so long as his wife, his tailor, his lawyer, and his servants could be persuaded to believe in the threat of punishment in an afterlife, “I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often.”49

The famous French writer Voltaire said that ‘the art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease’.