Voltaire

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

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

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

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

He has the deed half done who has made a beginning.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

A man’s interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.