Voltaire: A Sketch of His Life and Works

To pray is to flatter oneself that one will change entire nature with words.

Names of sects; names of error. Truth has no sect.

No man is called an Euclidian.

Henry IV., after his victories, his abjuration, and his coronation, caused a cross to be erected in Rome, with the following inscription: In hoc signa vincis. The wood of the cross was the carriage of a cannon.

A revolution has been accomplished in the human mind which nothing again can ever arrest.

It is never by metaphysics that you will succeed in delivering men from error; you must prove the truth by facts.

If fortune brings to pass one of a hundred events predicted by roguery, all the others are forgotten, and that one remains as a pledge of the favor of God, and as the proof of a prodigy.

Every one is born with a nose and five fingers, and no one is born with a knowledge of God. This may be deplorable or not, but it is certainly the human condition.

If God made us in his own image, we have well returned him the compliment.

Nature preserves the species, and cares but very little for individuals.

To fast, to pray, a priest’s virtue; to succor, virtue of a citizen.

When Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus, wished to ascend to heaven to discover the secrets of the gods, a fly stung Pegasus, and he was thrown.

“Why do you receive so many fools in your order?” was said to a Jesuit. “We need saints.”

Rousseau [J. B.] having shown his antagonist [Voltaire] his Ode to Posterity, the latter said: “My friend, here is a letter which will never reach its address.”

If a tulip could speak, and said, “My vegetation and I are two distinct beings, evidently joined together,” would you not mock at the tulip?

Why all these pleasantries on religion? They are never made on morality.

A fanatic of good faith, always a dangerous kind of man.

The consolation of life is to say out what one thinks.

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notes

1

He was a younger son. The name Voltaire is, perhaps, an anagram of the Arouet 1. j. (le jeune) the u being converted into r, and the j into r. In like manner, an old college- tutor of his, Père Thoulié, transformed himself, by a similar anagrammatic process, into the Abbé Olivet – omitting the unnecessary h from his original name. This method of reforming a plebeian name into one more distinguished-looking seems not to have been uncommon in those times, as Jean Baptiste Pocquelin took the name of Molière, and Charles Secondât that of Montesquieu.

2

“Our priests are not what foolish people suppose; all their science is derived from our credulity.”

3

Some of the accounts say that Voltaire said, “You, my lord, are the last of your house; I am the first of mine.”

4

Ever one foot in the grave,

And gambolling with the other.

5

Special mention should be made of the Bibliographie Voltairienne of M. L. Querard, and Voltaire: Bibliographie de ses Œuvres, in four volumes, by M. G. Bengesco, 1882- 1890.