Voltaire

Injustice in the end produces independence.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

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.

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

Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

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

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper – and despise it.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

There is only one good – knowledge; and only one evil – ignorance.

We are all alike, on the inside.

What drives me to be who I am, to do all that I do, is not what words will be engraved for my epitaph. What drives me to be who I am, to do what I do, is not vanity, is not for adulation in the eyes of others. What drives me is my own desire to be better; to be happy. When I am dead and buried, the words above will not bring me back to life, I choose to live out my epitaph, and not just for it to be a collection of words someone has chosen to define me.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life … would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.