Voltaire Quotes - 123 quotes

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Voltaire

Voltaire (1694-1778) was a prominent French writer, philosopher, and key figure of the Enlightenment. He is known for his wit and advocacy for civil liberties. He produced a vast array of works, including plays, essays, and the famous satirical novel "Candide". He was born François-Marie Arouet on ... show more

quote icon To hold a pen is to be at war.

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quote icon Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

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quote icon I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.

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quote icon Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons.

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quote icon The Eternal has his designs from all eternity. If prayer is in accord with his immutable wishes, it is quite useless to ask of him what he has resolved to do. If one prays to him to do the contrary of what he has resolved, it is praying that he be weak, frivolous, inconstant; it is believing that he is thus, it is to mock him. Either you ask him a just thing, in which case he must do it, the thing being done without your praying to him for it, and so to entreat him is then to distrust him; or the thing is unjust, and then you insult him. You are worthy or unworthy of the grace you implore: if worthy, he knows it better than you; if unworthy, you commit another crime by requesting what is undeserved.

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quote icon In a word, we only pray to God because we have made him in our image. We treat him like a pasha, like a sultan whom one may provoke or appease.

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

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

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quote icon It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

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quote icon Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

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quote icon It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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

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quote icon Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

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quote icon A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity.

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quote icon It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

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quote icon I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it.

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quote icon Thought depends largely on the stomach. In spite of this, those with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

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quote icon "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.

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quote icon I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

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quote icon I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

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quote icon The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

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

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

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quote icon Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon Under coercion there is no virtue, and without virtue there is no religion.

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quote icon Divorce is probably of nearly the same age as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon While loving glory so much how can you persist in a plan which will cause you to lose it?

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon Misfortune has its uses

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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quote icon To hold a pen is to be at war.

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quote icon We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

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quote icon Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

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quote icon Men are equal; it is not birth, it is virtue alone that makes them differ.

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quote icon One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.

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quote icon The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.

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quote icon Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.

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quote icon The most original minds borrowed from one another.

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quote icon It is with books as with the fire in our hearths; we go to a neighbor to get the embers and light it when we return home, pass it on to others, and it belongs to everyone.

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quote icon Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

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quote icon All styles are good except the boring kind.

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quote icon The superfluous is very necessary.

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quote icon It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

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quote icon Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

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quote icon The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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quote icon May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

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quote icon Clever tyrants are never punished.

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quote icon It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

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quote icon It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

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

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.

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quote icon It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

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quote icon A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.

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quote icon While loving glory so much how can you persist in a plan which will cause you to lose it?

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quote icon When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

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quote icon There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

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

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quote icon Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

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quote icon Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life.

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quote icon Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

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quote icon A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity

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quote icon But men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.

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quote icon I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it.

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quote icon Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

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quote icon A witty saying proves nothing.

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quote icon It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

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quote icon Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.

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quote icon It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.

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quote icon God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

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quote icon Thought depends largely on the stomach. In spite of this, those with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

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

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon The best is the enemy of the good.

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quote icon I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon It only remains for us to confess that God, having acted for the best, had not been able to do better.

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quote icon Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

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quote icon The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

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quote icon Ancient histories, as one of our wits has said, are but fables that have been agreed upon.

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quote icon Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body.

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quote icon If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.

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quote icon Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any experienced in a town when it is under siege.

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

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

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quote icon Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably. We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged—Define your terms.

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quote icon The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

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quote icon It is sad that often, to be a good patriot, one must be the enemy of the rest of mankind.

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quote icon All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.

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quote icon Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.

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quote icon Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

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quote icon Virtuous men alone possess friends.

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quote icon If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

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quote icon Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

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quote icon Prejudice is an opinion without judgement.

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quote icon What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature.

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quote icon The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.

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quote icon What a pity and what a poverty of spirit, to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which affect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, &c. [...] Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table, and dissect him living, to show the mezarian veins. You discover in him all the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves to be incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. [...] The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts, who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun.

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quote icon Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon Under coercion there is no virtue, and without virtue there is no religion.

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quote icon Divorce is probably of nearly the same age as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.

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quote icon It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

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quote icon Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said

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

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quote icon Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.

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

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quote icon To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

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