Voltaire Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous.

Voltaire
The geometrician makes a hundred thousand curved lines pass between a circle and a right line that touches it, when, in reality, there is not room for a straw to pass there.

Voltaire
Let nature be your first physician. It is she who made all.

Voltaire
We have our arts, the ancients had theirs... We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.

Voltaire
Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.

Voltaire
It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.

Voltaire
Great men have all been formed either before academies or independent of them.

Voltaire
What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.

Voltaire
We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.

Voltaire
All pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.

Voltaire
It is not a mistress I have lost but half of myself, a soul for which my soul seems to have been made.

Voltaire
Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself.

Voltaire
Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.

Voltaire
One must take a stand, but one should not take it at random. It is therefore necessary to our weak and blind human nature, always subject to error, to study probability with as much care as we learn arithmetic and geometry.

Voltaire
"But then to what end?" asked Candide, "was the world formed?" "To make us mad," said Martin.

Voltaire
From generation to generation skepticism increases; and probability diminishes; and soon probability is reduced to zero.

Voltaire
When Newton worked, with the bandage removed from his eyes, on his mathematics, his sight pierced to the utmost limits of nature.

Voltaire
The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

Voltaire
I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

Voltaire
What are you, Nature? Live in you? But I have been searching for you for fifty years, and have never been able to find you.

Voltaire
A good cook is a certain slow poisoner, if you are not temperate.

Voltaire
The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant.

Voltaire
We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age before we can rise above it.

Voltaire
I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

Voltaire
God prefers bad verses recited with a pure heart to the finest verses chanted by the wicked.

Voltaire
Los Padres have everything and the people have nothing; 'tis the masterpiece of reason and justice. For my part, I know nothing so divine as Los Padres who make war on Kings of Spain and Portugal and in Europe act as their confessors; who here kill Spaniards and at Madrid send them to Heaven.

Voltaire
We offer up prayers to god only because we have made him after our own image. We treat him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

Voltaire
The monster, fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted.

Voltaire
The mathematics will always be a kind of mystery to the bulk of the nation, and consequently will always be an object of veneration.

Voltaire
He who is involved in ecstasies and visions, who takes dreams for reality, and his own imagination for prophesy, is a fanatical novice of great hope and promise, and will soon advance to the higher stage and kill men for the love of God.

Voltaire