Voltaire - Time Quotes

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There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Voltaire
Pleasure has its time; so, too, has wisdom. Make love in thy youth, and in old age, attend to thy salvation.

Voltaire
Heroes of physics, Argonauts of our time
Who leaped the mountains, who crossed the seas...
You have confirmed in uncomfortable places
What Newton knew without leaving his study.

Voltaire
In this country [England] it is useful from time to time to kill one admiral in order to encourage the others.

Voltaire
I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley — in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered — or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide.

Voltaire
To General Manstein:
The king [Frederic] has sent me some of his dirty linen to wash; I will wash yours another time.

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
Dogs, monkeys, and parrots are a thousand times less miserable than we are.

Voltaire
Opinion is called the queen of the world; it is so, for when reason opposes it, it is condemned to death. It must rise twenty times from its ashes to gradually drive away the usurper.

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
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.

Voltaire
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.

Voltaire