Voltaire

War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice.

Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

Virtue between men is a commerce of good actions: he who has no part in this commerce must not be reckoned.

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

Heaven made virtue; man, the appearance.

He who seeks truth should be of no country.

Those who think are excessively few; and those few do not set themselves to disturb the world.

Every beauty, when out of it's place, is a beauty no longer.

The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

Providence has given us hope and sleep as a compensation for the many cares of life.

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.

All the persecutors declare against each other mortal war, while the philosopher, oppressed by them all, contents himself with pitying them.

The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him.

The abuse of grace is affectation, as the abuse of the sublime is absurdity; all perfection is nearly a fault.

The spirit of property doubles a man's strength.

The passions are the winds which fill the sails of the vessel; they sink it at times, but without them it would be impossible to make way.

We have our arts, the ancients had theirs... We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.

The policy of man consists, at first, in endeavoring to arrive at a state equal to that of animals, whom nature has furnished with food, clothing, and shelter.

Feeble verses are those which sin not against rules, but against genius.

There is a pleasure in not being pleased.

A physician is one who pours drugs of which he knows little into a body of which he knows less.

The harmony of a concert, to which you listen with delight, must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; perhaps it kills them.

Those who are absent, by its means become present; it [mail] is the consolation of life.

The superfluous is the most necessary.

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

The worthy administrators of justice are like a cat set to take care of a cheese, lest it should be gnawed by the mice. One bite of the cat does more damage to the cheese than twenty mice can do.

Men, generally going with the stream, seldom judge for themselves, and purity of taste is almost as rare as talent.

The rude beginnings of every art acquire a greater celebrity than the art in perfection; he who first played the fiddle was looked upon as a demigod.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

Adultery is an evil only inasmuch as it is a theft; but we do not steal that which is given to us.