Voltaire

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

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

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one… characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

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

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work.

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.