Voltaire - Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

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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
Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.

Voltaire
Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.

Voltaire
We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.

Voltaire
People sometimes say: "Common sense is quite rare."

Voltaire
Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

Voltaire
Prejudice is an opinion without judgement.

Voltaire
Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another.

Voltaire
It is sad that often, to be a good patriot, one must be the enemy of the rest of mankind.

Voltaire
If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

Voltaire
Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

Voltaire
All philosophical sects have run aground on the reef of moral and physical ill. It only remains for us to confess that God, having acted for the best, had not been able to do better.

Voltaire
Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or never inventors.

Voltaire
The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.

Voltaire
Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably. We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged—Define your terms.

Voltaire
Let us read, and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

Voltaire
Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.

Voltaire
A company of solemn tyrants is impervious to all seductions.

Voltaire
His reputation will go on increasing because scarcely anyone reads him.

Voltaire
Do not most of us resemble that old general of ninety who, having come upon some young officers debauching some girls, said to them angrily: "Gentlemen, is that the example I give you?"

Voltaire
Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

Voltaire
All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.

Voltaire
Luxury has been railed at for two thousand years, in verse and in prose, and it has always been loved.

Voltaire
The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

Voltaire
The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.

Voltaire