Voltaire

It is vain for the coward to flee death follows close behind it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

We are all full of weakness and errors let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.

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

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

Can you really believe that a drop of urine is an infinity of monads, and that each of these has ideas, however obscure, of the universe as a whole?

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.

Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Work banishes those three great evils boredom vice and poverty.

You (Pindar) who possessed the talent of speaking much without saying anything.

There are truths that are not for all men nor for all times.

Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

The secret of being tiresome is in telling everything.