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Hope should no more be a virtue than fear we fear and we hope, according to what is promised or threatened us.
Voltaire
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Voltaire
Age: 84 †
Born: 1694
Born: February 20
Died: 1778
Died: May 30
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Autobiographer
Correspondent
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Encyclopédistes
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
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Poet Lawyer
Political Scientist
Paris
France
François-Marie Arouet
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Francois Marie Arouet
Dictator of Letters
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Virtue
Hope
Fear
Promised
Threatened
More quotes by Voltaire
Optimism, said Cacambo, What is that? Alas! replied Candide, It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.
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We are rarely proud when we are alone.
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An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
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This is no time to make new enemies.
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But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.
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Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.
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A witty saying proves nothing.
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Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because there is nothing to be gained by him.
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Do you think... that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?
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The greatest consolation in life is to say what one thinks.
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Earth is an insane asylum, to which the other planets deport their lunatics.
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History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.
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Among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solutions to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise... The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application.
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He who doesn't have the spirit of his time, has all its misery.
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Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
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The most amazing and effective inventions are not those which do most honour to the human genius.
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Adultery is an evil only inasmuch as it is a theft but we do not steal that which is given to us.
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If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.
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No one is ignorant that our character and turn of mind are intimately connected with the water-closet.
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I also know that we should cultivate our gardens.
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