Quotes from Voltaire

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

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.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

The famous physician Dumoulin said when dying, 'I leave two great physicians behind me, simple food and pure water.'

The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.

Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal.

Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.

Will is wish, and liberty is power.

It is the first law of friendship that it has to be cultivated. The second is to be indulgent when the first law is neglected.

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongues, at our peril, risk and hazard.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

There are two things for which animals are to be envied: they know nothing of future evils, or of what people say about them.

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

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend - provided, of course, that he really is dead.

I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of their times.