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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
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A good cook is a certain slow poisoner, if you are not temperate.
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The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant.
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We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age before we can rise above it.
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I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.
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God prefers bad verses recited with a pure heart to the finest verses chanted by the wicked.
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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.
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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.
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The monster, fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted.
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The mathematics will always be a kind of mystery to the bulk of the nation, and consequently will always be an object of veneration.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him and to lose himself in his ideas.
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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.
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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?
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We adore, we invoke, we seek to appease, only that which we fear.
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Who are you, Nature?
I live in you;
for fifty years I have been seeking you,
and I have not found you yet.
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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.
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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.
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Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.
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Hope should no more be a virtue than fear; we fear and we hope, according to what is promised or threatened us.
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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.
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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.
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An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct.
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Quote of the day
To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
David Viscott
Voltaire
Creative Commons
Born:
November 21, 1694
Died:
May 30, 1778
(aged 83)
Bio:
François-Marie Arouet, famous using his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer, deist and philosopher.
Known for:
Candide (1759)
Zadig (1747)
L'Ingénu (1767)
Micromégas
Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)
Most used words:
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god
love
life
work
nature
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