Voltaire: A Sketch of his Life and Works Part 9

I believe, however, that marriage is several weeks the elder.

War is an epitome of all wickedness.

The race of preachers inveigh against little vices, and pa.s.s over great ones in silence. They never sermonise against war.

What strange rage possesses some people to insist on our all being miserable? They are like a quack, who would fain have us believe we are ill, in order to sell us his pills. Keep thy drugs, my friend, and leave me my health.

Can one change their character? Yes, if one changes their body.

Men are fools, but ecclesiastics are their leaders.

I do not believe even eye-witnesses when they tell me things opposed to common sense.

The fanatics begin with humility and kindness, and have all ended with pride and carnage.

The Pope is an idol, whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.

What an immense book might be composed on all the things once believed, of which it is necessary to doubt.

That which can be explained in many ways does not merit being explained in any.

Theology is in religion what poison is among food.

Theology has only served to upset brains, and sometimes States.

That which is an eternal subject of dispute is an eternal inutility.

To pray is to flatter oneself that one will change entire nature with words.

Names of sects; names of error. Truth has no sect.

No man is called an Euclidian.

Henry IV., after his victories, his abjuration, and his coronation, caused a cross to be erected in Rome, with the following inscription: _In hoc signa vincis_. The wood of the cross was the carriage of a cannon.

A revolution has been accomplished in the human mind which nothing again can ever arrest.

It is never by metaphysics that you will succeed in delivering men from error; you must prove the truth by facts.

If fortune brings to pa.s.s one of a hundred events predicted by roguery, all the others are forgotten, and that one remains as a pledge of the favor of G.o.d, and as the proof of a prodigy.

Every one is born with a nose and five fingers, and no one is born with a knowledge of G.o.d. This may be deplorable or not, but it is certainly the human condition.

If G.o.d made us in his own image, we have well returned him the compliment.

Nature preserves the species, and cares but very little for individuals.

To fast, to pray, a priest's virtue; to succor, virtue of a citizen.

When Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus, wished to ascend to heaven to discover the secrets of the G.o.ds, a fly stung Pegasus, and he was thrown.

"Why do you receive so many fools in your order?" was said to a Jesuit.

"We need saints."

Rousseau [J. B.] having shown his antagonist [Voltaire] his _Ode to Posterity_, the latter said: "My friend, here is a letter which will never reach its address."

If a tulip could speak, and said, "My vegetation and I are two distinct beings, evidently joined together," would you not mock at the tulip?

Why all these pleasantries on religion? They are never made on morality.

A fanatic of good faith, always a dangerous kind of man.

The consolation of life is to say out what one thinks.