Voltaire

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.

Better is the enemy of good.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential – there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

If you shoot at a king you must kill him.

We hate the kindness which we understand.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.

You cannot run faster than a bullet.

I think that age is irrelevant. We’re all pretty much spiritual beings – I consider myself to be about eighty-five. I feel like I’m ancient, like two thousand years old.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don’t say it.

Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner in which it is bestowed.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.