Voltaire

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

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

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

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.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Every one goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

Our thinking and our behaviour are always in anticipation of a response. It is therefore fear-based.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.

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

Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.