Voltaire

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

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

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.

Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite human beings, Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

The teacher reminded us that Romes liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sellexactly our own history over again.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.