Voltaire Quotes

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

~ Voltaire

Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.

~ Voltaire

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

~ Voltaire

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

~ Voltaire

The Dutch fetishes who converted me tell me every Sunday that the blacks and whites are all children of one father, whom they call Adam. As for me, I do not understand anything of genealogies; but if what these preachers say is true, we are all second cousins; and you must allow that it is impossible to be worse treated by our relations than we are.

~ Voltaire

You are very harsh.''I have seen the world.

~ Voltaire

All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.

~ Voltaire

By what incomprehensible mechanism are our organs held in subjection to sentiment and thought? How is it that a single melancholy idea shall disturb the whole course of the blood; and that the blood should in turn communicate irregularities to the human understanding? What is that unknown fluid which certainly exists and which, quicker and more active than light, flies in less than the twinkling of an eye into all the channels of life,—produces sensations, memory, joy or grief, reason or frenzy,—recalls with horror what we would choose to forget; and renders a thinking animal, either a subject of admiration, or an object of pity and compassion?

~ Voltaire

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

~ Voltaire

I tried to believe in God, but I confess to you that God meant nothing in my life, and that in my secret heart I too felt a void where my childhood faith had been. But probably this feeling belongs only to individuals in transition. The grandchildren of these pessimists will frolic in the freedom of their lives, and have more happiness than poor Christians darkened with fear of Hell.

~ Voltaire

had no need of a guide to learn ignorance

~ Voltaire

Tears are the silent language of grief.

~ Voltaire

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

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

~ Voltaire

Men employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

~ Voltaire

Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.

~ Voltaire

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

~ Voltaire

when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.

~ Voltaire

Injustice in the end produces independence.

~ Voltaire

Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.

~ Voltaire

But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?[Written after an earthquake in Lisbon killed over 15,000 people]

~ Voltaire

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

~ Voltaire

Quand celui à qui l'on parle ne comprend pas et celui qui parle ne se comprend pas, c'est de la métaphysiqueWhen he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics.

~ Voltaire

I assert nothing, I content myself with believing that more is possible than people think.

~ Voltaire

One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.

~ Voltaire

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

~ Voltaire

Men argue. Nature acts.

~ Voltaire

mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another.

~ Voltaire

Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.

~ Voltaire

I do not know by what power I think; but well I know that I should never have thought without the assistance of my senses. That there are immaterial and intelligent substances I do not at all doubt; but that it is impossible for God to communicate the faculty of thinking to matter, I doubt very much. I revere the Eternal Power, to which it would ill become me to prescribe bounds. I affirm nothing, and am contented to believe that many things are possible than are usually thought so.

~ Voltaire

Shall I not render a service to men in speaking to them only of morality? This morality is so pure, so holy, so universal, so clear, so ancient, that it seems to come from God himself, like the light which we regard as the first of his works. Has he not given men self-love to secure their preservation; benevolence, beneficence, and virtue to control their self-love; the natural need to form a society; pleasure to enjoy, pain to warn us to enjoy in moderation, passions to spur us to great deeds, and wisdom to curb our passions? 

~ Voltaire

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

~ Voltaire

The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.

~ Voltaire

I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken.

~ Voltaire

It is dangerous to be right, when the government is wrong

~ Voltaire

Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?

~ Voltaire

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciproc

~ Voltaire

All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.

~ Voltaire

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

~ Voltaire

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

~ Voltaire