I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

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

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

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

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

It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry...But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins' science not been long established in Europe...

If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

All styles are good except the boring kind.

All of the other people have committed crimes, the Jews are the only ones who have boasted about committing them. They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race.

"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.

The necessity of speaking, the predicament of having nothing to say, and the desire for tact are three things that can turn the greatest man into a laughingstock.

Paradise on earth is where I am.

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

Love truth, but pardon error.

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

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

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

The first who was king was a fortunate soldier: Who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

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

To hold a pen is to be at war.

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

The superfluous, a very necessary thing. Variant translation: The superfluous is very necessary.

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

Virtue is debased by self-justification.

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

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

Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

Life is just a notebook with blank pages. Every time we make a mistake, the pages get stained and living in it becomes impossible.

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

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

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

One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in.

Go into the London Stock Exchange - a more respectable place than many a court - and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.

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.

To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.

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

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

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

A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity.

Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.

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

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