Voltaire

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

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

I think a compliment ought to always precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.

There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.