Voltaire

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

The sky was the color of hard crimson, dripping down a canvas, the moon splashed silver across red. Her soothing balm healing my soul in swathes of calmness, I breathe in her tides and let my body be washed ashore, lying in the sands of eternity.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy – but he who has shown the better temper.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

To hazard much to get much has more of avarice than wisdom.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most… Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

God’s first creature, which was light.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.