Voltaire

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

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

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

Get a black suit and just freeload, problem it’s too God damned late now even to be any of the things I never wanted to be.

Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.

Live as brave men and face adversity with stout hearts.

Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised.

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers.

I am not an optimist, but a great believer of hope.

See, I think you live on earth a certain number of times until you finish what it is that you were meant to do here. And then you go on. I don’t think I’ll be back here. I think I’m done.

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Ah! Sir, a boy’s being flogged is not so severe as a man’s having the hiss of the world against him.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.