Voltaire

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Business is the salt of life.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

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.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

Socialists think profits are a vice; I consider losses the real vice.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

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.

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Do what you love. Know you own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.