Voltaire

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

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

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.

When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?

Life is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pass rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us.

We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.

Will is wish, and liberty is power.

A man loved by a beautiful woman will always get out of trouble.

The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational person.

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

Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.