Voltaire

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Give, even if you only have little.

Anger is short madness

We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.

For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times. You don’t mind the times … You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don’t think foolishly.

The place of justice is a hallowed place.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?