Top 500 Voltaire Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.”

— Voltaire

402. “Everything can be borne except contempt.”

— Voltaire

403. “We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.”

— Voltaire

404. “The superfluous, a very necessary thing.”

— Voltaire

405. “Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.”

— Voltaire

406. “The punishment of criminals should be of use; when a man is hanged he is good for nothing.”

— Voltaire

407. “Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.”

— Voltaire

408. “Come! you presence will either give me life or kill me with pleasure.”

— Voltaire

409. “I hate women because they always know where things are.”

— Voltaire

410. “The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.”

— Voltaire

411. “History contains little beyond a list of people who have accommodate themselves with other people’s property.”

— Voltaire

412. “If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbor, it is because we have other means of making good cheer.”

— Voltaire

413. “It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it’s a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.”

— Voltaire

414. “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.”

— Voltaire

415. “Secret griefs are more cruel than public calamities.”

— Voltaire

416. “This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau’s Ode To Posterity.”

— Voltaire

417. “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.”

— Voltaire

418. “It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.”

— Voltaire

419. “Truth is a fruit that can only be picked when it is very ripe.”

— Voltaire

420. “The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.”

— Voltaire

421. “It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village.”

— Voltaire

422. “Common sense is both more rare and more desirable in leaders than mere intelligence.”

— Voltaire

423. “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.”

— Voltaire

424. “The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.”

— Voltaire

425. “It is the first law of friendship that it has to be cultivated. The second is to be indulgent when the first law is neglected.”

— Voltaire

426. “Hope should no more be a virtue than fear; we fear and we hope, according to what is promised or threatened us.”

— Voltaire

427. “We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly.”

— Voltaire

428. “The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.”

— Voltaire

429. “Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.”

— Voltaire

430. “History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.”

— Voltaire

431. “It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.”

— Voltaire

432. “The spirit of property doubles a man’s strength.”

— Voltaire

433. “If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other’s throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace.”

— Voltaire

434. “Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.”

— Voltaire

435. “When truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to rise. There never has been a dispute as to whether there is daylight at noon.”

— Voltaire

436. “The famous physician Dumoulin said when dying, ‘I leave two great physicians behind me, simple food and pure water.’”

— Voltaire

437. “So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one’s fatherland is to wish evil to one’s neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.”

— Voltaire

438. “God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.”

— Voltaire

439. “One always begins with the simple, then comes the complex, and by superior enlightenment one often reverts in the end to the simple. Such is the course of human intelligence.”

— Voltaire

440. “The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous.”

— Voltaire

441. “I loved him as we always love for the first time; with idolatry and wild passion.”

— Voltaire

442. “God prefers bad verses recited with a pure heart to the finest verses chanted by the wicked.”

— Voltaire

443. “It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.”

— Voltaire

444. “To announce truths is an infallible receipt for being persecuted.”

— Voltaire

445. “Men fed upon carnage, and drinking strong drinks, have all an impoisoned and acrid blood which drives them mad in a hundred different ways.”

— Voltaire

446. “Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.”

— Voltaire

447. “History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes. L’histoire n’est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs.”

— Voltaire

448. “Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege.”

— Voltaire

449. “He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.”

— Voltaire

450. “True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten oneself and others.”

— Voltaire