Voltaire

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

The ear is the avenue to the heart.

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

I hate women because they always know where things are.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

What is once well done is done forever.

Know that the amount of criticism you receive may correlate somewhat to the amount of publicity you receive.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?