Quotes About Voltaire

The S.E.C. has not been loath to join the popular hue and cry against the friendless short seller. From this we have a right to deduce that they not only want an orderly market, but a market which shall forever gently rise. Of course, that conception is just plain silly, like Voltaire's suggestion that a community ought to be able to support itself by everybody taking in everybody else's washing.

There isn't an equation that can confirm something as self-evident (to us humans) as "muggy weather is uncomfortable" or "mothers are older than their daughters." There has been some progress made in translating this sort of information into mathematical logic, but to catalog the common sense of a four-year-old child would require hundreds of millions of lines of computer code. As Voltaire once said, "Common sense is not so common.

Voltaire argued that if God did not exist Man would be obliged to invent him, and was reviled for the remark.

It has been argued that in the eighteenth century a person with an annual income of 15,000 livres or more could be described as wealthy, and a person with an income of 30,000 livres or more could be described as extremely wealthy.1 If this benchmark is even roughly valid, it implies that when Voltaire became wealthy, after 1729, he became very, very, very wealthy.

Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them. VOLTAIRE

Voltaire called the calculus "the Art of numbering and measuring exactly a Thing whose Existence cannot be conceived." See Letters Concerning the English Nation p. 152

Doubt is not a pleasant state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

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

What Ingersoll, like Voltaire and Paine before him, understood was the indivisibility of human rights, and he understood this not in spite of but precisely because of his disbelief in a deity who had supposedly "designed" the order of nature.

Two of the most productive writers in history, Voltaire and Balzac, were also among the greatest coffee addicts in history. So far, caffeine hasn't made me nearly that productive, but I can hope.

Voltaire, the French philosopher and writer of the Enlightenment era who lived for many years just a few miles away from where I am writing this book, once said: "Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one."74

François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), I

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is.

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

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Gibbon's breathtaking chapter on early Christianity (volume I, chapter 15 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or in Candide, Voltaire's devastating mockery of Leibniz's claim that 'all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds'.m

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

I sympathise afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

Joie est mon caractere, C'est la faute a Voltaire; Misere est mon trousseau C'est la faute a Rousseau. [Joy is my character, 'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau 'Tis the fault of Rousseau.] - Gavroche

I am bored in France, especially as everyone resembles Voltaire.

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other.

about Voltaire)...he was generally unbedeviled by any foolish consistency.

By early 1778, Voltaire was 84 and ailing, and there had even been stories that he had died. (His retort, even better than Mark Twain's similar one, was that the reports were true, only premature.)

If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer.