Voltaire

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Every great movement must experience three stages ridicule, discussion, adoption.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

No comment is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

Labor diligently to increase your property.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.