Voltaire

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

To hold a pen is to be at war.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

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

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

I want to be all used up when I die.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can’t blame them for that, can you?

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

The more you know, the less you need.

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.