Nov 21, 1694 - May 30, 1778
French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and free trade
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Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.
Fear follows crime and is its punishment.
What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.
Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?
Nature has always had more force than education.
It is vain for the coward to flee death follows close behind it is only by defying it that the brave escape.
The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.
I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Business is the salt of life.
God gave us the gift of life it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.
The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.
In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.
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.
We are rarely proud when we are alone.
He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
God is a comedian with an audience too afraid to laugh.
He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.
Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.
You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.
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.
Work banishes those three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.
If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new.
Weakness on both sides is, the motto of all quarrels.
Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
