Voltaire Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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