It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

The king Frederic has sent me some of his dirty linen to wash; I will wash yours another time.

It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it.

Virtue is debased by self-justification.

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

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

Thought depends largely on the stomach. In spite of this, those with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

All mortals are equal; it is not their birth,But virtue itself that makes the difference.

The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.

Ancient histories, as one of our wits has said, are but fables that have been agreed upon.

Use, do not abuse; as the wise man commands. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

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

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

All styles are good except the boring kind.

Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.

When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

A witty saying proves nothing.

We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

A people that sells its own children is more condemnable than the buyer; this commerce demonstrates our superiority; he who gives himself a master was born to have one.

All philosophical sects have run aground on the reef of moral and physical ill. It only remains for us to confess that God, having acted for the best, had not been able to do better.

The superfluous, a very necessary thing. 

It is very strange that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

"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.

One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, - astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.

A single part of physics occupies the lives of many men, and often leaves them dying in uncertainty.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous.

I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it. You will please people by your manner of telling them the truth about themselves, but you will not alter them. The horrors of that human society-from which in our feebleness and ignorance we expect so many consolations-have never been painted in more striking colours: no one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. Since, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it: I leave this natural habit to those more fit for it than are you and I.

Man ought to be content, it is said; but with what?

Paradise on earth is where I am.

Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?

It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.

The universe is composed of matter, and, as a system, is sustained by motion. Motion is not a property of matter, and without this motion the solar system could not exist. Were motion a property of matter, that undiscovered and undiscoverable thing, called perpetual motion, would establish itself. It is because motion is not a property of matter, that perpetual motion is an impossibility in the hand of every being, but that of the Creator of motion. When the pretenders to Atheism can produce perpetual motion, and not till then, they may expect to be credited.

It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.