Voltaire Quotes

I loved him as we always love for the first time, with idolatry and wild passion.

~ Voltaire

She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.

~ Voltaire

We never live, we are always in the expectation of living.

~ Voltaire

Let us work without reasoning,' said Martin; 'it is the only way to make life endurable.

~ Voltaire

Perfect is the enemy of good.

~ Voltaire

It is forbidden to kill, therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

~ Voltaire

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.

~ Voltaire

Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.

~ Voltaire

on doit des égards aux vivants, on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.

~ Voltaire

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

~ Voltaire

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

~ Voltaire

It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.

~ Voltaire

God gave us the gift of life, it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

~ 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

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

~ Voltaire

S'il n'existait pas Dieu il faudrait l'inventer. (If God did not exist he would have to be invented.)

~ Voltaire

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

~ Voltaire

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

~ Voltaire

Wisdom must yield to superstition's rules,Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools.

~ Voltaire

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one

~ Voltaire

A fondness for roving, for making a name for themselves in their onw country, and for boasting of what they had seen in their travels, was so strong in our two wanderers, that they resolved to be no longer happy; and demanded permission of the king to leave the country.

~ Voltaire

The heart has its own reasons that reason can't understand.

~ Voltaire

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

~ Voltaire

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

~ Voltaire

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

~ Voltaire

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.

~ Voltaire

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

~ Voltaire

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.)

~ Voltaire

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

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

~ Voltaire

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

~ Voltaire

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

~ 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

What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbors, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

~ Voltaire

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

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

~ 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

Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.

~ Voltaire

If they're from the village, you take them to the inn. If they're from the city, you treat them with respect when they are beautiful and throw them on the highway when they are dead.

~ Voltaire

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

~ Voltaire