Voltaire

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

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

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.

As you get older, you realize that no one has all the answers. It turns out that life is an exercise in living with the certainty of uncertainty. – Jason Kilar

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.

Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead – and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

Most people want to avoid pain, and discipline is usually painful.

Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it. Every man is to judge for himself, according to the effects which he experiences.