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He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.
Voltaire
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Voltaire
Age: 84 †
Born: 1694
Born: February 20
Died: 1778
Died: May 30
Author
Autobiographer
Correspondent
Diarist
Encyclopédistes
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
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Paris
France
François-Marie Arouet
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Francois Marie Arouet
Dictator of Letters
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Shining
More quotes by Voltaire
Almost all life depends on probabilities.
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I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.
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It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.
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A physician is one who pours drugs of which he knows little into a body of which he knows less.
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The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant.
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What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.
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If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.
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The abuse of grace is affectation, as the abuse of the sublime is absurdity all perfection is nearly a fault.
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The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.
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Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.
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We only half live when we only half think.
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Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.
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The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
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Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror. But what shall we substitute in its place? you say. What? A ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my relatives. I tell you to rid yourselves of this beast, and you ask me what you shall put in its place ?
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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.
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Love truth, and pardon error.
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Ice-cream is exquisite - what a pity it isn't illegal.
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So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.
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Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.
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It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
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