Voltaire Quotes

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

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.

We offer up prayers to God only because we have made Him after our own image. We treat Him like a Pasha or a Sultan who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

There are truths that are not for all men nor for all times.

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

My prayer to God is a very short one "Oh Lord make my enemies ridiculous!" God has granted it.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid - one must also be polite.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God grante

Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The secret of being tiresome is in telling everything.

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)

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

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

had no need of a guide to learn ignorance

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

Men argue. Nature acts.

All the known world excepting only savage nations is governed by books.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

When it is a question of money everybody is of the same religion.

Common sense is not so common.

The first step my son which one makes in the world is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

It is proved...that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.

The fate of a nation has often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister.

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

Often the prudent far from making their destinies succumb to them.

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little to cure diseases of which they know less in human beings of whom they know nothing.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day and of doing good once in a year.

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.

England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.

Faith is believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

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.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend- provided of course he really is dead.

The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

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

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.

The best is the enemy of the good.

The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything.

Imagine all contradictions, all possible incompatibilities--you will find them in the government, in the law-courts, in the churches, in the public shows of this droll nation.

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

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.