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Quotes by Voltaire

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
– Voltaire
The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.
– Voltaire
The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.
– Voltaire
The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.
– Voltaire
The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.
– Voltaire
The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.
– Voltaire
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
The secret of being tiresome is in telling everything.
– Voltaire
The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.
– Voltaire
The superfluous, a very necessary thing.
– Voltaire
The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.
– Voltaire
The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.
– Voltaire
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
– Voltaire
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
– Voltaire
This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.
– Voltaire
Thou sleepest, Brutus, and yet Rome is in chains.
– Voltaire
Though one sits in meditation in a particular place, the Self in him can exercise its influence far away. Though still, it moves everywhere... The Self cannot be known by anyone who desists not from unrighteous ways, controls not his senses, stills not his mind, and practices not meditation.
– Voltaire
To be at peace in crime! ah, who can thus flatter himself.
– Voltaire
To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.
– Voltaire
To hold a pen is to be at war.
– Voltaire
To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.
– Voltaire
To them it seemed that the gifts of an enemy were to be dreaded.
– Voltaire
Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.
– Voltaire
Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.
– Voltaire
Very often, say what you will, a knave is only a fool.
– Voltaire
We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly.
– Voltaire
We cannot wish for that we know not.
– Voltaire
We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.
– Voltaire
Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.
– Voltaire
What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
– Voltaire
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
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
– Voltaire
What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.
– Voltaire
When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
– Voltaire
When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
– Voltaire
Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.
– Voltaire
You see many stars at night in the sky but find them not when the sun rises; can you say that there are no stars in the heaven of day? So, O man! because you behold not God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.
– Voltaire
Your destiny is that of a man, and your vows those of a god.
– Voltaire
Your Majesty may think me an impatient sick man, and that the Turks are even sicker.
– Voltaire
All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.
– Voltaire
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
– Voltaire
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
– Voltaire
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
– Voltaire
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
– Voltaire
Love truth, and pardon error.
– Voltaire
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
– Voltaire
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
– Voltaire
Prejudice is opinion without judgement.
– Voltaire
Regimen is superior to medicine.
– Voltaire
The secret of being boring is to say everything.
– Voltaire
There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable.
– Voltaire
You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
– Voltaire
Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
– Voltaire
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
– Voltaire
This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
– Voltaire
The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.
– Voltaire
When we hear news we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
– Voltaire
Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.
– Voltaire
We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.
– Voltaire
We are rarely proud when we are alone.
– Voltaire
To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.
– Voltaire
Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.
– Voltaire
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.
– Voltaire
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
– Voltaire
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.
– Voltaire
Of all religions, the Christian should of course inspire the most tolerance, but until now Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.
– Voltaire
Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.
– Voltaire
Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.
– Voltaire
It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.
– Voltaire
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
It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
– Voltaire
Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
– Voltaire
History should be written as philosophy.
– Voltaire
God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.
– Voltaire
Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.
– Voltaire
All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.
– Voltaire
Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
– Voltaire