Voltaire

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

Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

In this magical hour, as the black ink sky fades to forget-me-not grey and the Cyprus trees emerge from the shadows, I tune in to my heart. In clarity, I choose to step into freedom to bring lightness of being and to be love.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

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

An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

If you weren’t such a great man, you’d be a terrible bore.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

My emancipation don’t fit your equation.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.