Quotes from Voltaire

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.

Give me the patience for the small things of life, courage for the great trials of life. Help me to do my best each day and then go to sleep knowing God is awake.

One always begins with the simple, then comes the complex, and by superior enlightenment one often reverts in the end to the simple. Such is the course of human intelligence.

Common sense is both more rare and more desirable in leaders than mere intelligence.

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

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

Fanaticism is a monster that pretends to be the child of religion

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

The Bible. That is what fools have written, what imbeciles commend, what rogues teach and young children are made to learn by heart.

If we would destroy the Christian religion, we must first of all destroy man's belief in the Bible.

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

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.

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.

Let us meet four times a year in a grand temple with music, and thank God for all his gifts. There is one sun. There is one God. Let us have one religion. Then all mankind will be brethren.

Meslier was the most singular phenomenon ever seen among all the meteors fatal to the Christian religion.

Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.

If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.

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

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

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. It is not enough that a thing be possible for it to be believed.

In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.

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.