Voltaire Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

All joys do not cause laughter; great pleasures are serious: pleasures of love do not make us laugh.

Voltaire
The history of the world's great leaders is often the story of human folly.

Voltaire
If one must serve, I hold it better to serve a well-bred lion, who is naturally stronger than I am, than two hundred rats of my own breed.

Voltaire
It is strange that thought should depend upon the stomach, and still that men with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

Voltaire
The English plays are like their English puddings: nobody has any taste for them but themselves.

Voltaire
"Well! sage Evhemere, what have you seen in all your travels?" "Follies!"

Voltaire
Work keeps us from three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty.

Voltaire
Work keeps away those three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.

Voltaire
Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Voltaire
In this best of all possible worlds... everything is for the best.

Voltaire
It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.

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

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

Voltaire
What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.

Voltaire
Clever tyrants are never punished.

Voltaire
When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?

Voltaire
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.

Voltaire
The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

Voltaire
I am not like a lady at the court of Versailles, who said: 'What a dreadful pity that the bother at the tower of Babel should have got language all mixed up; but for that, everyone would always have spoken French.'

Voltaire
Whoever you are, behold your master,
He is, or was, or has to be.

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

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

Voltaire
It is fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions

Voltaire
The harmony of a concert, to which you listen with delight, must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; perhaps it kills them.

Voltaire
I read these words which are the sum of all moral philosophy, and which cut short all the disputes of the casuists: When in doubt if an action is good or bad, refrain.

Voltaire
Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

Voltaire
Why, since we are always complaining of our ills, are we constantly employed in redoubling them?

Voltaire
Virtue between men is a commerce of good actions: he who has no part in this commerce must not be reckoned.

Voltaire
It is with history, as it is with mathematics and natural philosophy; the field of it is immensely enlarged. The more easy it is to compile newspapers, the more difficult it is at the present day to write history.

Voltaire
Dogs, monkeys, and parrots are a thousand times less miserable than we are.

Voltaire