Voltaire - Nature Quotes

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

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

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
It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.

Voltaire
Let nature be your first physician. It is she who made all.

Voltaire
The Devil should not try his tricks on a clever physician. Those familiar with nature are dangerous for the wonderworkers. I advise the Devil always to apply to the faculty of theology — not to the medical faculty.

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 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
Virtue supposes liberty, as the carrying of a burden supposes active force. Under coercion there is no virtue, and without virtue there is no religion. Make a slave of me, and I shall be no better for it. Even the sovereign has no right to use coercion to lead men to religion, which by its nature supposes choice and liberty. My thought is no more subject to authority than is sickness or health.

Voltaire
It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.

Voltaire
I cannot guess what may be the fate of Quakerism in America; but I perceive it loses ground daily in England. In all countries, where the established religion is of a mild and tolerating nature, it will at length swallow up all the rest.

Voltaire
All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.

Voltaire
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in the System of Nature [of d'Holbach] — after the recipe for making eels from flour — is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried to prove the impossibility.

Voltaire
What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature.

Voltaire
To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.

Voltaire
But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.

Voltaire
"If God did not exist, he would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

Voltaire