Quotes About Voltaire

It occurred to him as a passing thought that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

He was so ill now that a priest came to shrive him. "From whom do you come, M. l'Abbé?" asked Voltaire. "From God Himself," was the answer. "Well, well, sir," said Voltaire; "your credentials?"121 The priest went away without his prey.

When he sent to Voltaire his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, with its arguments against civilization, letters, and science, and for a return to the natural condition as seen in savages and animals, Voltaire replied: "I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it . . . . No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes; to read your book makes one long to go on all fours.

Voltaire learned that he was again on the way to the Bastille. Like a good philosopher, he took to his heels—merely utilizing the occasion to elope with another man's wife.

In general, the wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done the opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire says, we shall leave the world as foolish and wicked as we found it."65

One day he asked a visitor whence he came. "From Mr. Haller's." "He is a great man," said Voltaire; "a great poet, a great naturalist, a great philosopher, almost a universal genius." "What you say, sir, is the more admirable, as Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice." "Ah," said Voltaire, "perhaps we are both mistaken.

When he quoted Voltaire's dictum that 'the history of the human mind is the history of stupidity', he meant it from the bottom of his heart.

Religion and politics never merged into a single construct, leading to Voltaire's truthful jest that the Holy Roman Empire was "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The

Y mientras aguardaba al mounstro concluí que Suiza era el país perfecto para las pesadillas de Füssli y para la chispa incendiaria de Rousseau, para la sonrisa regicida de Voltaire, para los laberintos espaciales de Joyce y para los laberintos mentales de Borges; que en cada rincón de aquellas montañas parece posible la rosa que resurge de la ceniza en las manos de Paracelso.

Voltaire expected that within fifty years of his lifetime there would not be one Bible in the world. His house is now a distribution centre for Bibles in many languages.

The opposition of reason and religion that runs through the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which identified religion with the Catholic Church, would have been incomprehensible to Leibniz, and a like opposition never gained a footing in German culture even after him. On the contrary, the acutest critic of Christianity, Nietzsche, shows his German roots by the fact that he simultaneously wages war on reason - which would again have been incomprehensible to Voltaire.

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

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.

In this best of all possible worlds… everything is for the best.

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

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.

Your book is dedicated by the soundest reason. You had better get out of France as quickly as you can.