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 women are never at a loss, God provides for them, let us run.”
“Only cut off a buttock of each of those ladies,' said he,'and you'll fare extremely well; if you must go to it again, there will be the same entertainment a few days hence; heaven will accept of so charitable an action, and send you relief.”
“mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another.”
“I know this love, that sovereign of hearts, that soul of our souls; yet it never cost me more than a kiss and twenty kicks on the backside. How could this beautiful cause produce in you an effect so abominable.”
“but whether he be, or whether he be not, I want bread.”
“God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.”
“The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.”
“Everything is not as good as in El-Dorado; but everything is not so bad.”
“In every author, let us distinguish the man from his work.”
“Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours. ”
“Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.”
“History never repeats itself. Man always does.”
“It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.”
“Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.”
“when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.”
“Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.”
“had no need of a guide to learn ignorance”
“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.”
“A fondness for roving, for making a name for themselves in their onw country, and for boasting of what they had seen in their travels, was so strong in our two wanderers, that they resolved to be no longer happy; and demanded permission of the king to leave the country.”
“He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. "We do not pray to him at all," said the reverend sage. "We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.”
“What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to our bosoms tillhe has gnawed into our hearts?”
“It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.”
“The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational person. ”
“Qui plus sait, plus se tait”
“Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.”
“I am ignorant of how I was formed and how I was born. Through a quarter of my lifetime I was absolutely ignorant of the reasons for everything I saw and heard and felt, and was merely a parrot prompted by other parrots... When I sought to advance along that infinite course, I could neither find one single footpath or fully discover one single object, and from the upward leap I made to contemplate eternity I fell back into the abyss of my ignorance.”
“I have no morals, yet I am a very moral person”
“People have declaimed against luxury for two thousand years, in verse and prose, and people have always delighted in it.”
“The interest I have to believe a thing is no proof that such a thing exists.”
“To a toad, what is beauty? A female with pop eyes, a wide mouth, yellow belly, and a spotted back,”
“The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.”
“He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.”
“God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.”
“Injustice in the end produces independence.”
“Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.”
“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”
“We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.”
“We are rarely proud when we are alone.”
“If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.”
“Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.”
“It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.”
“Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.”
“If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.”
“It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions.”
“There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.”
“Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.”
“I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want.”
“In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.”
“Questa ridicola debolezza è forse una delle nostre inclinazioni più funeste: c'è qualcosa di più sciocco del voler portare continuamente un fardello che vorremmo sempre gettare a terra? Di avere orrore della propria esistenza e di tenersi aggrappati alla propria esistenza? Insomma di accarezzare il serpente che ci divora, finché ci abbia mangiato il cuore?”
“Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace. ”