Voltaire Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

Did anyone ever so much as think of talking geometry in good company?

Voltaire
The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.

Voltaire
Hope should no more be a virtue than fear; we fear and we hope, according to what is promised or threatened us.

Voltaire
Nothing could be smarter, more splendid, more brilliant, better drawn up than two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, cannons, formed a harmony such as never been heard in hell.

Voltaire
Man can have only a certain number of teeth, hair and ideas; there comes a time when he necessarily loses his teeth, hair and ideas.

Voltaire
An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct.

Voltaire
Pleasantry is never good on serious points, because it always regards subjects in that point of view in which it is not the purpose to consider them.

Voltaire
Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them. -Francois

Voltaire
What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.

Voltaire
History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

Voltaire
You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Voltaire
Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.

Voltaire
Mathematics must subdue the flights of our reason; they are the staff of the blind; no one can take a step without them; and to them and experience is due all that is certain in physics.

Voltaire
It is reported in the supplement of the council of Nicæan that the fathers, being very perplexed to know which were the cryphal or apocryphal books of the Old and New Testaments, put them all pell-mell on an altar, and the books to be rejected fell to the ground. It is a pity that this eloquent procedure has not survived.

Voltaire
Who are you, Nature?
I live in you;
for fifty years I have been seeking you,
and I have not found you yet.

Voltaire
We adore, we invoke, we seek to appease, only that which we fear.

Voltaire
It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?

Voltaire
History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times.

Voltaire
Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him and to lose himself in his ideas.

Voltaire
The system of Descartes... seemed to give a plausible reason for all those phenomena; and this reason seemed more just, as it is simple and intelligible to all capacities. But in philosophy, a student ought to doubt of the things he fancies he understands too easily, as much as of those he does not understand.

Voltaire
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.

Voltaire