Voltaire

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

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

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

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

If there is something to gain and nothing to lose by asking, by all means ask!

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and new.

I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

We are prisoners of ideas.

The heart is forever inexperienced.