Top 500 Voltaire Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he’s certain he’ll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?”

— Voltaire

202. “By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.”

— Voltaire

203. “Dogs, monkeys, and parrots are a thousand times less miserable than we are.”

— Voltaire

204. “What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity.”

— Voltaire

205. “It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.”

— Voltaire

206. “Let us meet four times a year in a grand temple with music, and thank God for all his gifts. There is one sun. There is one God. Let us have one religion. Then all mankind will be brethren.”

— Voltaire

207. “The way to become boring is to say everything.”

— Voltaire

208. “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.”

— Voltaire

209. “He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.”

— Voltaire

210. “Men appear to prefer ruining one another’s fortunes, and cutting each other’s throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.”

— Voltaire

211. “The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

— Voltaire

212. “A physician is one who pours drugs of which he knows little into a body of which he knows less.”

— Voltaire

213. “I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.”

— Voltaire

214. “There are no sects in geometry.”

— Voltaire

215. “Inspiration: A peculiar effect of divine flatulence emitted by the Holy Spirit which hisses into the ears of a few chosen of God.”

— Voltaire

216. “Happiness is a good that nature sells us.”

— Voltaire

217. “No, nothing has the power to part me from you; our love is based upon virtue, and will last as long as our lives.”

— Voltaire

218. “We know that all the arts are brothers, that each of them illuminates another, and that a universal light results.”

— Voltaire

219. “What can we say with certainty?”

— Voltaire

220. “Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose plays please only in London and Canada.”

— Voltaire

221. “Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason.”

— Voltaire

222. “You write your name in the snow Yet say nothing.”

— Voltaire

223. “Democracy is just a filler for textbooks! Do you actually believe that public opinion influences the government?”

— Voltaire

224. “If we would destroy the Christian religion, we must first of all destroy man’s belief in the Bible.”

— Voltaire

225. “How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! how horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite.”

— Voltaire

226. “The road to the heart is the ear.”

— Voltaire

227. “Minds differ still more than faces.”

— Voltaire

228. “Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.”

— Voltaire

229. “It would be very singular that all nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his caprice.”

— Voltaire

230. “Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.”

— Voltaire

231. “What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.”

— Voltaire

232. “In the matter of taxation, every privilege is an injustice.”

— Voltaire

233. “He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.”

— Voltaire

234. “The Jews are of all peoples the grosses, the most ferocious, the most fanatical, and the most absurd.”

— Voltaire

235. “Fear follows crime and is its punishment.”

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

237. “The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational person.”

— Voltaire

238. “Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.”

— Voltaire

239. “He is lifeless that is faultless.”

— Voltaire

240. “Of all religions, the Christian should of course inspire the most tolerance, but until now Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.”

— Voltaire

241. “Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.”

— Voltaire

242. “History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.”

— Voltaire

243. “To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.”

— Voltaire

244. “The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.”

— Voltaire

245. “Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them.”

— Voltaire

246. “She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.”

— Voltaire

247. “The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy.”

— Voltaire

248. “True power and true politeness are above vanity.”

— Voltaire

249. “Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.”

— Voltaire

250. “Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.”

— Voltaire