Voltaire

Let us help one another to bear our burdens.

Hope should no more be a virtue than fear; we fear and we hope, according to what is promised or threatened us.

Great men have all been formed either before academies or independent of them.

Everyone places his good where he can and has as much of it as he can, in his own way.

In France every man is either an anvil or a hammer; he is a beater or must be beaten.

If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age.

Fear could never make virtue.

The more estimable the offender, the greater the torment.

All succeeds with people who are sweet and cheerful.

Give me a few minutes to talk away my face and I can seduce the Queen of France.

No one is ignorant that our character and turn of mind are intimately connected with the water-closet.

A good cook is a certain slow poisoner, if you are not temperate.

We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age before we can rise above it.

Ask a toad what is beauty ...; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.

All pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.

Antiquity is full of the praises of another antiquity still more remote.

All the arts are brothers; each one is a light to the others.

There is no such thing as an accident. What we call by that name is the effect of some cause which we do not see.

To announce truths is an infallible receipt for being persecuted.

It is only through timidity that states are lost.

He who doesn't have the spirit of his time, has all its misery.

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

He who dies before many witnesses always does so with courage.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries.

Truth is a fruit which should not be plucked until it is ripe....

Democracy is just a filler for textbooks! Do you actually believe that public opinion influences the government?

The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.

A circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic.