This self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.
The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.
Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.
England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.
To succeed in chaining the multitude, you must seem to wear the same fetters.
It was decided by the university of Coimbre that the sight of several persons being slowly burned in great ceremony is an infallible secret for preventing earthquakes.
In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice.
Prejudice is opinion without judgement.
Let us read, and let us dance — these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
To enjoy life we must touch much of it lightly.
If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.
Work is often the father of pleasure.
Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.
An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.
Hope should no more be a virtue than fear; we fear and we hope, according to what is promised or threatened us.
Nature has always had more force than education.
The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.
In France every man is either an anvil or a hammer; he is a beater or must be beaten.
Ask a toad what is beauty....; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat head, a yellow belly and a brown back.
I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide.
I acknowledge that four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is.
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