Famous Quotes

Quotes by Voltaire

• Tears are the silent language of grief.
• The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.
• 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.
• The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
• The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
• The best is the enemy of the good.
• The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.
• The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work.
• The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
• The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.
• The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
• The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.
• The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.
• The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.
• The superfluous, a very necessary thing.
• The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.
• The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.
• There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
• Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.
• To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.
• To hold a pen is to be at war.
• To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.