Voltaire

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

Better is the enemy of good.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

Nature has always had more force than education.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

A good scare is worth more than good advice.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.