Voltaire

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.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

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

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.

A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?