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 comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.”
“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.”
“The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”
“Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.”
“But in this country it is necessary, now and then, to put one admiral to death in order to inspire the others to fight.”
“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”
“If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated."(Notebooks)”
“Paradise is where I am”
“I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?'That is a hard question,' said Candide.”
“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination. ”
“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
“If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new.”
“It is demonstrable," said he, "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles, therefore My Lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Swine were intended to be eaten, therefore we eat pork all the year round: and they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.”
“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”
“When a man is in love, jealous, and just whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself.”
“I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.”
“I would rather obey a fine lion, much stronger than myself, than two hundred rats of my own species.”
“It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books.”
“To hold a pen is to be at war.”
“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.)”
“Do you believe,' said Candide, 'that men have always massacred each other as they do to-day, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?'Do you believe,' said Martin, 'that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?”
“Said Candide to Cacambo:My friend, you see how perishable are the riches of this world; there is nothing solid but virtue, and the happiness of seeing Cunegonde once more.”
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
“if Columbus in an island of America had not caught the disease, which poisons the source of generation, and often indeed prevents generation, we should not have chocolate and cochineal”
“Liberty of thought is the life of the soul.”
“We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence”
“the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.”
“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
“Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.”
“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.”
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
“theology is to religion what poisons are to food”
“Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.”
“Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.”
“But for what purpose was the earth formed?" asked Candide. "To drive us mad," replied Martin.”
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
“It is proved...that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.”
“L'homme est libre au moment qu'il veut l'être.”
“Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.”
“Illusion is the first of all pleasures”
“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."(Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)”
“Man is free at the instant he wants to be.”
“Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal.”
“Dare to think for yourself.”
“Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.”
“Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.”
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
“It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.”
“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
“Common sense is not so common.”