Voltaire Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

They squeeze the orange and throw away the skin.

Voltaire
Love is a canvas furnished by Nature, and embroidered by imagination.

Voltaire
All the persecutors declare against each other mortal war, while the philosopher, oppressed by them all, contents himself with pitying them.

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 fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions

Voltaire
A circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic.

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
Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voltaire