Voltaire

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

All styles are good except the tiresome kind.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.

No man was ever great by imitation.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

As the Spanish proverb says, He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

You don’t stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.