Quotes from Voltaire

We know that all the arts are brothers, that each of them illuminates another, and that a universal light results.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

One feels like crawling on all fours after reading your work.

Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.

Work banishes those three great evils boredom vice and poverty.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

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.

Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.

Every beauty, when out of it's place, is a beauty no longer.

To a toad what is beauty? A female with two lovely pop-eyes, a wide mouth, yellow belly, and green spotted back.

Ask a toad what is beauty? ... a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head a large flat mouth a yellow belly and a brown back.

The best way to be boring is to include everything.

We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good; we do the best we know.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

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

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well

It is not known precisely where angels dwell - whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God's pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.

Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.

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.

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.

By appreciation we make excellence in others our own property.