Top 500 Voltaire Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Voltaire

208. “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

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

211. “There are no sects in geometry.”

— Voltaire

212. “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

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

— Voltaire

214. “What can we say with certainty?”

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

222. “Music is the pathway to the heart.”

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

224. “Minds differ still more than faces.”

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

227. “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

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

234. “He is lifeless that is faultless.”

— Voltaire

235. “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

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

242. “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

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

246. “The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant.”

— Voltaire

247. “Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.”

— Voltaire

248. “Self love is the instrument of our preservation.”

— Voltaire

249. “Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.”

— Voltaire

250. “Adultery is an evil only inasmuch as it is a theft; but we do not steal that which is given to us.”

— Voltaire