Voltaire

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

Weakness on both sides is as we know the motto of all quarrels.

Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

Often the prudent far from making their destinies succumb to them.

Better is the enemy of the good.

The best is the enemy of the good.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

Writing is the painting of the voice.

And to every man has been assigned a good and an evil angel; one assisting him and the other annoying him, from his cradle to his coffin.

A witty saying proves nothing.

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one__ very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of humanity. We are all fallible, let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right.

People will continue to commit atrocities as long as they believe in absurdities.

Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege.

Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)

We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence