Voltaire Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 the citizens of a state cannot be equally powerful, but they may be equally free

Voltaire
It was decided by the university of Coimbre that the sight of several persons being slowly burned in great ceremony is an infallible secret for preventing earthquakes.

Voltaire
If there are atheists, who is to be blamed if not the mercenary tyrants of souls who, in revolting us against their swindles, compel some feeble spirits to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?

Voltaire
He who has heard the thing told by twelve thousand eyewitnesses, has only twelve thousand probabilities, equal to one strong probability, which is not equal to certainty.

Voltaire
He who cannot shine by thought, seeks to bring himself into notice by a witticism.

Voltaire
What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.

Voltaire
A lady of honor may be raped once, but it strengthens her virtue.

Voltaire
But of all the sciences, the most absurd, and that which in my opinion, is most calculated to stifle genius of every kind, is geometry. The objects about which this ridiculous science is conversant are surfaces, lines, and points, that have no existence in nature.

Voltaire
The abuse of grace is affectation, as the abuse of the sublime is absurdity; all perfection is nearly a fault.

Voltaire
Those who think are excessively few; and those few do not set themselves to disturb the world.

Voltaire
What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?

Voltaire
Do you think... that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?

Voltaire
Antiquity is full of the praises of another antiquity still more remote.

Voltaire
The malevolence of men revealed itself to his mind in all of its ugliness

Voltaire
If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.

Voltaire
The policy of man consists, at first, in endeavoring to arrive at a state equal to that of animals, whom nature has furnished with food, clothing, and shelter.

Voltaire
The true character of liberty is independence, maintained by force.

Voltaire
We are going to a new world... and no doubt it is there that everything is for the best; for it must be admitted that one might lament a little over the physical and moral happenings of our own world.

Voltaire