Voltaire Quotes

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

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.)

Common sense is not so common.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Love truth, but pardon error.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." (Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)

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.

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way.

Dare to think for yourself.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.

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?

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

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.

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.

Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal.

You're a bitter man," said Candide. That's because I've lived," said Martin.

Let us cultivate our garden.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.

Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on...

Perfect is the enemy of good.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

But for what purpose was the earth formed?" asked Candide. "To drive us mad," replied Martin.

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

No opinion is worth burning your neighbor for.

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us

Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.

May God defend me from my friends: I can defend myself from my enemies.

Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.

History never repeats itself. Man always does.

The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.

One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite.

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.

Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.

I would rather obey a fine lion, much stronger than myself, than two hundred rats of my own species.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

The best is the enemy of good.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated." (Notebooks)

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.

What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

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

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.

In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide.

If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)

Minds differ still more than faces.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her; but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

When a man is in love, jealous, and just whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself.

The more a man knows, the less he talks.

Men argue. Nature acts.

Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.

Do you believe,' said Candide, 'that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?' Do you believe,' said Martin, 'that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets