Voltaire Quotes
Voltaire Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Voltaire quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Voltaire. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
By Voltaire
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. War
By Voltaire
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of resoning.
By Voltaire
The world will never truly be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
By Voltaire
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. Poetry
By Voltaire
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind. Patriotism
By Voltaire
Judge (in the same way as you would judge your own) the behaviour of a dog who has lost his master, who has searched for him in the road barking miserably, who has come back to the house restless and anxious, who has run upstairs and down, from room to room, and who has found the beloved master at last in his study, and then shown his joy by barks, bounds and caresses. There are some barbarians who will take this dog, that so greatly excels man in capacity for friendship, who will nail him to a table, and dissect him alive, in order to show you his veins and nerves. And what you then discover in him are all the same organs of sensation that you have in yourself. Answer me, mechanist, has Nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering?
By Voltaire
How pitiful, and what poverty of mind, to have said that the animals are machines deprived of understanding and feeling . . . has Nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may he incapable of suffering? People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines . . . It appears to me, besides, that [such people] can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different Voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel. . . . They are endowed with life as we are, because they have the same principles of life, the same feelings, the same ideas, memory, industry—as we.
By Voltaire
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy. Age
By Voltaire
You despise books you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
By Voltaire
You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
By Voltaire
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
By Voltaire