Voltaire

Nature has always had more force than education.

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

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

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.

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

It is not known precisely where angels dwell whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.