Voltaire

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

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.

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

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

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

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

If you live for people’s acceptance, you’ll die from their rejections.

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. They prefer suffering that is familiar to the unknown.

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.

We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love’s light we dare be brave And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

We are ashamed of our thoughts and often see them brought forth by others.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.