Voltaire
Complete works (1880) : https://archive.org/details/oeuvresco...
In 1694, Age of Enlightenment leader Francois-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was born in Paris. Jesuit-educated, he began writing clever verses by the age of 12. He launched a lifelong, successful playwriting career in 1718, interrupted by imprisonment in the Bastille. Upon a second imprisonment, in which Francois adopted the pen name Voltaire, he was released after agreeing to move to London. There he wrote Lettres philosophiques (1733), which galvanized French reform. The book also satirized the religious teachings of Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal, including Pascal's famed "wager" on God. Voltaire wrote: "The interest I have in believing a thing is not a proof of the existence of that thing." Voltaire's French publisher was sent to the Bastille and Voltaire had to escape from Paris again, as judges sentenced the book to be "torn and burned in the Palace." Voltaire spent a calm 16 years with his deistic mistress, Madame du Chatelet, in Lorraine. He met the 27 year old married mother when he was 39. In his memoirs, he wrote: "I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did, and decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind." He dedicated Traite de metaphysique to her. In it the Deist candidly rejected immortality and questioned belief in God. It was not published until the 1780s. Voltaire continued writing amusing but meaty philosophical plays and histories. After the earthquake that leveled Lisbon in 1755, in which 15,000 people perished and another 15,000 were wounded, Voltaire wrote Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (Poem on the Lisbon Disaster): "But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?"
Voltaire purchased a chateau in Geneva, where, among other works, he wrote Candide (1759). To avoid Calvinist persecution, Voltaire moved across the border to Ferney, where the wealthy writer lived for 18 years until his death. Voltaire began to openly challenge Christianity, calling it "the infamous thing." He wrote Frederick the Great: "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." Voltaire ended every letter to friends with "Ecrasez l'infame" (crush the infamy — the Christian religion). His pamphlet, The Sermon on the Fifty (1762) went after transubstantiation, miracles, biblical contradictions, the Jewish religion, and the Christian God. Voltaire wrote that a true god "surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough," or inspired "books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror." He also published excerpts of Testament of the Abbe Meslier, by an atheist priest, in Holland, which advanced the Enlightenment. Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary was published in 1764 without his name. Although the first edition immediately sold out, Geneva officials, followed by Dutch and Parisian, had the books burned. It was published in 1769 as two large volumes. Voltaire campaigned fiercely against civil atrocities in the name of religion, writing pamphlets and commentaries about the barbaric execution of a Huguenot trader, who was first broken at the wheel, then burned at the stake, in 1762. Voltaire's campaign for justice and restitution ended with a posthumous retrial in 1765, during which 40 Parisian judges declared the defendant innocent. Voltaire urgently tried to save the life of Chevalier de la Barre, a 19 year old sentenced to death for blasphemy for failing to remove his hat during a religious procession. In 1766, Chevalier was beheaded after being tortured, then his body was burned, along with a copy of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary. Voltaire's statue at the Pantheon was melted down during Nazi occupation. D. 1778.
Voltaire (1694-1778), pseudónimo de François-
“The Flames? Already?”
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
“Les beaux esprits se rencontrent.”
“All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.”
“What's Optimism?' asked Cacambo. 'I'm afraid to say,' said Candide, 'that it's a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”
“It is not improbable that in hot countries, monkeys may have enslaved girls.”
“If one doesn't get what one wants in one world, one can always get it in another”
“For can anything be sillier than to insist on carrying a burden one would continually much rather throw to the ground?”
“Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.”
“It is difficult to free people from the chains they revere.”
“All is for the best in the best of possible worlds.”
“Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.”
“La casualidad no es, ni puede ser más que una causa ignorada de un efecto desconocido”
“Men must have somewhat altered the course of nature; for they were not born wolves, yet they have become wolves. God did not give them twenty-four-pounders or bayonets, yet they have made themselves bayonets and guns to destroy each other. In the same category I place not only bankruptcies, but the law which carries off the bankrupts’ effects, so as to defraud their creditors.”
“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”
“Wir sind nicht nur dafür verantwortlich was wir tun, sondern auch dafür, was wir nicht tun.”
“Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.”
“Indolence is sweet, and its consequence bitter.”
“A State can be no better than the citizens of which it is composed. Our labour now is not to mould States but make citizens.”
“Divert yourself, and ask each passenger to tell his story, and if there is one of them all who has not cursed his existence many times, and said to himself over and over again that he was the most miserable of men, I give you permission to throw me head-first into the sea.”
“We find in them an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.”
“L’amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu’elle attaque à la fois la tête, le cœur et le corps.”
“Always beware of turning religion into metaphysics: Morality is its essence.”
“I have chosen to be happy because it is good for my health.”
“Size kimin hükmettiğini öğrenmek istiyorsanız, sadece kimi eleştirme izniniz olmadığını bulun.”
“Wherever my travels may lead, paradise is where I am.”
“Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery, the sight of which is so revolting to our delicacy. Peoples separated from the Roman religion have imitated but imperfectly so generous a charity.”
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
“All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women”
“What can be feared when one is doing one's duty? I know the rage of my enemies. I know all their slanders; but when one only tries to do good to men and when one does not offend heaven, one can fear nothing, neither during life nor after death.”
“It is the triumph of superior reason to live with folks who don't have any.”
“I swear that, not being able to be yours, I will belong to no one.”
“He was my equal in beauty, a paragon of grace and charm, sparkling with wit, and burning with love. I adored him to distraction, to the point of idolatry: I loved him as one can never love twice.”
“Depois do terramoto que destruíra três quartos de Lisboa, os sábios do país não acharam meio mais eficaz de prevenir uma ruína total que oferecer um belo Auto-da-fé; foi decidido pela Universidade de Coimbra que o espetáculo de algumas pessoas queimadas em lume brando, numa grande cerimónia, é um segredo infalível para impedir a terra de tremer.”
“La joie d'un homme heureux serait une insulte ; mais deux malheureux sont comme deux arbrisseaux faibles qui, s'appuyant l'un sur l'autre, se fortifient contre l'orage.”
“The more a man knows, the less he talks.”
“Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote antiquity.”
“The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.”
“If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.”
“To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.”
“En philosophie, il faut se défier de ce qu'on croit entendre trop aisément, aussi bien que des choses qu'on n'entend pas.”
“What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide."That is because I know what life is," said Martin.”
“It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.”
“There is some pleasure in having no pleasure.”
“But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything--in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.''You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.”
“You are very harsh.''I have seen the world.”
“A witty saying proves nothing.”
“What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.”
“It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love.”
“I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.”