Top 500 Voltaire Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.”

— Voltaire

52. “Let us cultivate our garden.”

— Voltaire

53. “It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

— Voltaire

54. “God created woman to tame man.”

— Voltaire

55. “Fanaticism is a monster that pretends to be the child of religion.”

— Voltaire

56. “Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.”

— Voltaire

57. “Life is a shipwreck but we must remember to sing in the lifeboats.”

— Voltaire

58. “Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.”

— Voltaire

59. “Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.”

— Voltaire

60. “We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.”

— Voltaire

61. “All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.”

— Voltaire

62. “I would rather obey a fine lion, much stronger than myself, than two hundred rats of my own species.”

— Voltaire

63. “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

— Voltaire

64. “It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.”

— Voltaire

65. “Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”

— Voltaire

66. “The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.”

— Voltaire

67. “We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good; we do the best we know.”

— Voltaire

68. “One should always aim at being interesting, rather than exact.”

— Voltaire

69. “God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”

— Voltaire

70. “Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.”

— Voltaire

71. “Wherever my travels may lead, paradise is where I am.”

— Voltaire

72. “To enjoy life we must touch much of it lightly.”

— Voltaire

73. “The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him.”

— Voltaire

74. “I have chosen to be happy because it is goo for my health.”

— Voltaire

75. “Tears are the silent language of grief.”

— Voltaire

76. “We adore, we invoke, we seek to appease, only that which we fear.”

— Voltaire

77. “We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.”

— Voltaire

78. “It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.”

— Voltaire

79. “There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.”

— Voltaire

80. “Give me the patience for the small things of life, courage for the great trials of life. Help me to do my best each day and then go to sleep knowing God is awake.”

— Voltaire

81. “Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.”

— Voltaire

82. “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.”

— Voltaire

83. “Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.”

— Voltaire

84. “A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people’s attention.”

— Voltaire

85. “It is not the answers you give, but the questions you ask.”

— Voltaire

86. “History is the lie commonly agreed upon.”

— Voltaire

87. “A long dispute means both parties are wrong.”

— Voltaire

88. “The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”

— Voltaire

89. “Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”

— Voltaire

90. “Constant happiness is the philosopher’s stone of the soul.”

— Voltaire

91. “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”

— Voltaire

92. “History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.”

— Voltaire

93. “Why are the Jews hated? It is the inevitable result of their laws; they either have to conquer everybody or be hated by the whole human race...”

— Voltaire

94. “History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.”

— Voltaire

95. “If there’s life on other planets, then the earth is the Universe’s insane asylum.”

— Voltaire

96. “The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.”

— Voltaire

97. “Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

99. “Man is not born wicked; he becomes so, as he becomes sick.”

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire