Voltaire

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

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

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage which conceals the faults of those beloved. He has wings, he comes quickly and flies away the same.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.

No man was ever great by imitation.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

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

Not even the Devil can call a woman “Slut” if he is not able to make her fall in love.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

There is a wisdom of the head, and there is a wisdom of the heart.