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.

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

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

Better is the enemy of good.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Business is the salt of life.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.

No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

Revolutions are always verbose.

Do not let spacious plans for a new world divert your energies from saving what is left of the old.

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

We love and lose in China, we weep on England’s moors, and laugh and moan in Guinea, and thrive on Spanish shores. We seek success in Finland, are born and die in Maine. In minor ways we differ, in major we’re the same.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.