Voltaire

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Better is the enemy of good.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

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.

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Lilac anemone, paper petals, turning tentatively to face a pale sun opening to reveal a lightness of being, a flash of gold, a fresh resilience, contented silence, the dawn of a new day.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,’ you just scream.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.