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 happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.”
“When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.”
“Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.”
“O supérfluo é uma coisa muito necessária.”
“The multitude of books is making us ignorant. ”
“All is but illusion and disaster.”
“Il est coupable de tout le bien qu'il ne fait pas.”
“Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them”
“I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.”
“Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.”
“One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion”
“A man loved by a beautiful woman will always get out of trouble.”
“The only way to make men speak well of us is to do it.”
“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”
“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”
“Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing”
“Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her; but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.”
“After all, it is no more surprising to me to be born twice than it is to be born once.”
“No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.”
“I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way.”
“To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.”
“One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.”
“All styles are good except the tiresome kind.”
“Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.”
“It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.”
“my soul is the mirror of the universe, and my body is its frame”
“The greatest consolation in life is to say what one thinks.”
“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.”
“The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him”
“I already began to inspire the men with love. My breast began to take its right form, and such a breast! white, firm, and formed like that of the Venus de' Medici; my eyebrows were as black as jet, and as for my eyes, they darted flames and eclipsed the luster of the stars, as I was told by the poets of our part of the world. My maids, when they dressed and undressed me, used to fall into an ecstasy in viewing me before and behind; and all the men longed to be in their places. ”
“Being a bird ain't all about flying and shitting from high places.”
“History is the study of the world's crime”
“The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.”
“The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.”
“Wisdom must yield to superstition's rules,Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools.”
“Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.”
“Когато стане въпрос за пари, всички сме от една религия!”
“Crush the infamous thing!”
“You're a bitter man," said Candide.That's because I've lived," said Martin.”
“Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste”
“In de ene helft van ons leven offeren we ons leven op om geld te verdienen. In de andere helft offeren we ons geld om weer gezond te worden”
“Il est démontré, disait-il, que les choses ne peuvent être autrement; car tout étant fait pour une fin, tout est nécessairement pour la meilleure fin. Remarquez bien que les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes; aussi avons-nous des lunettes”
“Let us work without reasoning,' said Martin; 'it is the only way to make life endurable.”
“All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunegonde, if you hadn't been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn't traveled across America on foot, if you hadn't given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn't lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn't be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. - That is very well put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.”
“There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable.”
“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?”
“To caress the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten away our heart.”
“I hold firmly to my original views. After all I am a philosopher. ”
“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
“Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.”