Voltaire

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

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

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

To inherit property is not to be born – it is to be still-born, rather.

Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.

Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day – farther and wider – and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.