Top 100 Voltaire's Quotes
#1. I only read books if Voltaire's cock has been dipped in red ink and rolled over the cover.
Greg Proops
#2. I expressed just now my mistrust of what is called Spiritualism - ... I owe it a trifle for a message said to come from Voltaire's Ghost. It was asked, Are you not now convinced of another world? and rapped out, There is no other world - Death is only an incident in Life.
William De Morgan
#3. What! A ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my family. I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, What shall we put in its place!" Voltaire's
Mitchell Stephens
#4. I tend to look at the world more from Voltaire's perspective. Incidentally, if you haven't read Candide lately, it's a fabulous book. It's riotously, laugh-out-loud funny in a way that no Shakespeare comedy will ever be.
George Meyer
#5. Unfortunately we did not attend Voltaire's dictum to define our terms before we began. The result was disagreement on all issues.
James Aldridge
#6. Voltaire's Si Dieu n'existait pas , il faudrait l'inventer ("If God did not exist, he would have to be invented").
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#7. Just for the sake of amusement, ask each passenger to tell you his story, and if you find a single one who hasn't often cursed his life, who hasn't told himself he's the most miserable man in the world, you can throw me overboard head first.
Voltaire
#8. I've decided to be happy because it's good for my health.
Voltaire
#9. What's Optimism?' asked Cacambo. 'I'm afraid to say,' said Candide, 'that it's a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.
Voltaire
#10. This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity
Voltaire
#11. You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real.
David Lee Roth
#12. Time is man's most precious asset. All men neglect it; all regret the loss of it; nothing can be done without it.
Voltaire
#13. We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence
Voltaire
#14. I found out and lost the only place I ever sort of regarded as home. Oh well. Best to stay in one's garden but Voltaire was a boring writer and sex is one of the greatest things there is.
Kathy Acker
#15. The spirit of property doubles a man's strength.
Voltaire
#16. If it's too silly to be said, it can always be sung.
Voltaire
#17. To find why this sheep's wool was red; and the prize was awarded to a learned man of the North, who demonstrated by A plus B minus C divided by Z, that the sheep must be red, and die of the rot.
Voltaire
#18. The Baron's lady weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds, and was therefore a person of great consideration..
Voltaire
#19. History contains little beyond a list of people who have accommodate themselves with other people's property.
Voltaire
#20. If we would destroy the Christian religion, we must first of all destroy man's belief in the Bible.
Voltaire
#21. 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.
Voltaire
#22. Changing a habit is hard work. But it's harder to find work that would be more fulfilling
Voltaire
#23. What can be feared when one is doing one's duty? I know the rage of my enemies. I know all their slanders; but when one only tries to do good to men and when one does not offend heaven, one can fear nothing, neither during life nor after death.
Voltaire
#24. One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion
Voltaire
#25. My dear young lady, when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there's no knowing what you may do.
Voltaire
#26. Every man can educate himself. It's shameful to put one's mind into the hands of those whom you wouldn't entrust with your money. Dare to think for yourself.
Voltaire
#27. A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention.
Voltaire
#28. In short, the alphabet was the origin of all man's knowledge, and of all his errors.
Voltaire
#29. Oh, there's no toll," noticed Henry. "It costs twelve bucks coming into Manhattan, but I guess it's free going back to New Jersey."
"That should tell you something," said Villy crestfallen.
Aurelio Voltaire
#30. And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one's own life are other men, they who are so desperately preoccupied with their own. I knew nothing about you and that boy, nothing at all.
William Styron
#31. The Baron was one of Westphalia's most potent aristocrats, since his mansion boasted both a door and windows.
Voltaire
#32. So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.
Voltaire
#33. The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.
Voltaire
#34. 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
#35. Wisdom must yield to superstition's rules,
Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools.
Voltaire
#36. You may be able to read Bernard Shaw's plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#37. What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of humanity. We are all fallible, let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right.
Voltaire
#38. History is the study of the world's crime
Voltaire
#39. Every beauty, when out of it's place, is a beauty no longer.
Voltaire
#40. It is not known precisely where angels dwell whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.
Voltaire
#41. When one man speaks to another man who doesn't understand him, and when a man who's speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics.
Voltaire
#42. How many plays have been written in France?' Candide asked the abbe.
'Five or six thousand.'
'That's a lot,' said Candide. 'How many of them are good?'
'Fifteen or sixteen,' replied the abbe.
'That's a lot,' said Martin.
Voltaire
#43. The mirror is a worthless invention. The only way to truly see yourself is in the reflection of someone else's eyes.
Voltaire
#44. Fairest lady," said Candide, "when a man is in love, jealous, and whipped by the Inquisition, he no longer knows what he's doing.
Voltaire
#45. What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?
Voltaire
#46. 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
#47. It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
Voltaire
#48. That strange premature genius Chatterton has couched in one line the quintessence of what Voltaire has said in many pages: Reason, a thorn in Revelation's side.
Horace Walpole
#49. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
S.G. Tallentyre
#50. You're a bitter man," said Candide.
That's because I've lived," said Martin.
Voltaire
#51. It is, it seems to me, to stop one's eyes and understanding to maintain that there is no design in nature; and if there is design, there is an intelligent cause, there exists a God. People
Voltaire
#52. What's optimism? said Cacambo.
Alas, said Candide, it is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.
Voltaire
#53. My life's dream has been a perpetual nightmare.
Voltaire
#54. The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.
Voltaire
#55. The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor.
Voltaire
#56. To caress the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten away our heart.
Voltaire
#57. A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough ... [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.
Voltaire
#58. Did you hear that
did you have any choice about whether to hear it
Voltaire
#59. The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
Voltaire
#60. You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason.
Voltaire
#61. A small number of choice books are sufficient.
Voltaire
#62. We are at the end of all our troubles, and at the beginning of happiness
Voltaire
#63. The way to become boring is to say everything.
Voltaire
#64. Those who are absent, by its means become present: correspondence is the consolation of life. - VOLTAIRE, Philosophical Dictionary
Colin Dexter
#65. The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.
Voltaire
#66. Beautiful maiden," answered Candide, "when a man is in love, is jealous, and has been flogged by the Inquisition, he becomes lost to all reflection.
Voltaire
#67. There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.
Bertrand Russell
#68. This thought has met with the fate of many other useful projects, of being applauded and neglected.
Voltaire
#69. The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.
Voltaire
#70. It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.
Voltaire
#71. The secret of being tiresome is in telling everything.
Voltaire
#72. It is difficult to free people from the chains they revere.
Voltaire
#73. Independence in the end is the fruit of injustice.
Voltaire
#74. Every abuse ought to be reformed, unless the reform is more dangerous than the abuse itself.
Voltaire
#75. The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.
Voltaire
#76. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#77. The nose has been formed to bear spectacles - thus we have spectacles.
Voltaire
#78. Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It's the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.
Voltaire
#79. If there's life on other planets, then the earth is the Universe's insane asylum.
Voltaire
#80. Constant happiness is the philosopher's stone of the soul.
Voltaire
#81. You guys, stop misattributing white nationalist quotes to me. Like, super seriously, it's not cool, dudes.
Voltaire
#82. But he had been the victim of the world's most common crime - his youth had been kidnapped by a thing called time. It had likely also been raped, dismembered, and buried somewhere never to be seen again
Aurelio Voltaire
#83. Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.
Voltaire
#84. God's only excuse is that He doesn't exist, remarked Voltaire after a natural disaster that killed many people. Nietzsche loved this quote and wished he'd coined it!
Voltaire
#85. Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.
Voltaire
#86. It's not inequality which is the real misfortune, it's dependence
Voltaire
#87. Goth was sort of the melancholy cousin of punk that says: there's a lot of evil in this world, there's a lot of very mean spirited people and that makes me sad.
Aurelio Voltaire Hernandez
#89. Freedom is to depend only on the law and not on men's whims.
Voltaire
#90. There's scarce a point whereon mankind agree - So well as in their boast of killing me; I boast of nothing, but when I've a mind - I think I can be even with mankind
Voltaire
#91. He's over your head! He was, but naturally I'd flung myself into the Sea of Voltaire anyway and emerged with nothing more than several aphorisms.
Sue Monk Kidd
#92. Alas ... I too have known love, that ruler of hearts, that soul of our soul: it's never brought me anything except one kiss and twenty kicks in the rump. How could such a beautiful cause produce such an abominable effect on you?
Voltaire
#93. Needless to say since Christ's expiation not one single Christian has been known to sin, or die.
Voltaire
#94. If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other's throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace
Voltaire
#95. Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons.
Voltaire
#96. There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable.
Voltaire
#97. The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.
Voltaire
#98. Consequently they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing, they should have said all is for the best.
Voltaire
#99. 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
#100. It is best one should quote what one doesn't understand at all in the language one knows the least
Voltaire
