It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body.
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.
Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.
I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.
Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it.
Thought depends largely on the stomach. In spite of this, those with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.
"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.
I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.
Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.
Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.
The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.
Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
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.
The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.
Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.
Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so.
Under coercion there is no virtue, and without virtue there is no religion.
Divorce is probably of nearly the same age as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.
In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
While loving glory so much how can you persist in a plan which will cause you to lose it?
Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.
Certainly any one who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
To hold a pen is to be at war.
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without cause.
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
Once your faith ... persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life.
What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.
A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity.
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
Misfortune has its uses