Voltaire Quotes

351 Sourced Quotes

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

Voltaire
All joys do not cause laughter; great pleasures are serious: pleasures of love do not make us laugh.

Voltaire
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

Voltaire
With the world, do not resort to injuries, but only to irony and gayety: injury revolts, while irony makes one reflect, and gayety disarms.

Voltaire
It is a serious question among them whether they [Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.

Voltaire
To hold a pen is to be at war.

Voltaire
The Eternal has his designs from all eternity. If prayer is in accord with his immutable wishes, it is quite useless to ask of him what he has resolved to do. If one prays to him to do the contrary of what he has resolved, it is praying that he be weak, frivolous, inconstant; it is believing that he is thus, it is to mock him.

Voltaire
We know many truths; we have discovered many useful inventions. Let us console ourselves for not knowing possible connections between a spider and the ring of Saturn, and continue examining what is within our reach.

Voltaire
Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

Voltaire
What a fuss about an omelette!
When he heard of the burning of De l'esprit

Voltaire
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
If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbor, it is because we have other means of making good cheer

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
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