Voltaire

What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to our bosoms tillhe has gnawed into our hearts?

And ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.

Having lived with kings, I have become a king in my own home.

Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

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

We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.

Imagine all contradictions, all possible incompatibilities--you will find them in the government, in the law-courts, in the churches, in the public shows of this droll nation.

Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

At a great distance appeared with the same pomp the sheep of Thebes, the dog of Bubastis, the cat of Phoebe, the crocodile of Arsinoe, the goat of Mendes, and all the inferior gods of Egypt, who came to pay homage to the great ox, to the mighty Apis, as powerful as Isis, Osiris, and Horus, united together.In the midst of the demi-gods, forty priests carried an enormous basket, filled with sacred onions. These were, it is true, gods, but they resembled onions very much.("The White Bull")

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

It is fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions.

My dear young lady, when you are in love, and jealous, and have been flogged by the Inquisition, there's no knowing what you may do.

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)

But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.''You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.

In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.