"By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property."
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Voltaire quotes (page 16 of 36)
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"The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law."
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"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."
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"Before receiving your instruction, I must tell you what happened to me one day. I had just had a closet built at the end of my garden. I heard a mole arguing with a cockchafer; 'Here's a fine structure,' said the mole, 'it must have been a very powerful mole who did this work.' 'You're joking,' said the cockchafer; 'it's a cockchafer full of genius who is the architect of this building.' From that moment I resolved never to argue."
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"The best way to be boring is to include everything."
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"Common sense is both more rare and more desirable in leaders than mere intelligence."
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"I have chosen to be happy because it is goo for my health."
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"All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God."
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"Do well and you will have no need for ancestors."
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"It is only through timidity that states are lost."
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"Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies." (Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)"
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"Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness."
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"Alas...I too have known love, that ruler of hearts, that soul of our soul: it's never brought me anything except one kiss and twenty kicks in the rump. How could such a beautiful cause produce such an abominable effect on you?"
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"If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age."
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"It is reported in the supplement of the council of Nicæan that the fathers, being very perplexed to know which were the cryphal or apocryphal books of the Old and New Testaments, put them all pell-mell on an altar, and the books to be rejected fell to the ground. It is a pity that this eloquent procedure has not survived."
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"Villains are undone by what is worst in them, heroes by what is best."
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"Shun idleness. It is rust that attaches itself to the most brilliant metals."
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"Nature has always had more force than education."
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"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."
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"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."
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