Voltaire

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

The teacher reminded us that Romes liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sellexactly our own history over again.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

Every old poem is sacred.

If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.