Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.
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If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
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Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well
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Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres. (In this country England it is thought well to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others. from Candide)
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Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
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People have declaimed against luxury for 2000 years, in verse and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.
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There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.
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If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
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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.
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A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady.
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If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.
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The first who was king was a fortunate soldier Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.
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Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
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Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.
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One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.
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The best is the enemy of the good.
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If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him. But all nature cries aloud that He does exist that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
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It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
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I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.
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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.
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To hold a pen is to be at war.
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It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
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There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
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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.
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God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh.
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Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.
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It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
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All styles are good except the tiresome kind.
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He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.
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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
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