Voltaire Quotes
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We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.
[Being]
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We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.
[Life]
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We offer up prayers to God only because we have made Him after our own image. We treat Him like a Pasha, or a Sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.
[Prayer]
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Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.
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What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
[Fame]
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What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.
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What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
[Age]
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What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.
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When he that speaks, and he to whom he speaks, neither of them understand what is meant, that is metaphysics.
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When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
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When it is a question of money, everyone is of the same religion.
[Money]
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When we hear news we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
[News]
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Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.
[Ancestry]
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Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
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Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
[Work]
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You (Pindar) who possessed the talent of speaking much without saying anything.
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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.
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You see many stars at night in the sky but find them not when the sun rises; can you say that there are no stars in the heaven of day? So, O man! because you behold not God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.
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