Voltaire Quotes on Knowledge
Voltaire's Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733) and the Philosophical Dictionary (1764) introduced the British empiricism of Locke and Newton to a French audience accustomed to the rationalism of Descartes, and helped make the experimental method and inductive caution the defining intellectual virtues of the French Enlightenment. The polemical Voltaire — the campaigner against l'infâme, the writer of the Treatise on Tolerance and the Calas pamphlets, the satirist of metaphysical optimism in Candide — operates throughout from the empiricist conviction that the proper objects of human knowledge are the small empirical truths supplied by careful observation, and that the speculative metaphysics of Leibniz, the theology of Pascal, and the political theology of the ancien régime must each be measured against that standard.
Quotes
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Attributed to Voltaire:
“Common sense is not so common.”
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Attributed to Voltaire:
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
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Attributed to Voltaire:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
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Attributed to Voltaire:
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
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Attributed to Voltaire:
“Prejudices are what fools use for reason.”
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“On parle toujours mal quand on n'a rien à dire.”
One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say. "Commentaires sur Corneille", Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (1827) -
“One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say. "Commentaires sur Corneille", Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (1827)”
On parle toujours mal quand on n'a rien à dire. -
“Pensées, Remarques, et Observations de Voltaire; ouvrage posthume (1802) Posthumously published "Thoughts, remarks and observations" believed to be by Voltaire”
L'homme doit être content, dit-on; mais de quoi? -
“Le public est une bête féroce: il faut l'enchaîner ou la fuir.”
The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it. Letter to Mademoiselle Quinault, quoted in Charles Sainte-Beuve, "Lettres inédites de Voltaire," Causeries de Lundi (20 October 1856) ; an English translation can be found on this page: -
“L'amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu'elle attaque à la fois la tête, le cœur et le corps.”
Love is of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart, and the body. Le Dernier Volume Des Œuvres De Voltaire: Contes — Comédie — Pensées -— Poésies — Lettres (1862) -
“Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy, the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.”
1760s | "Whether it is useful to maintain the people in superstition," Treatise on Toleration (1763) -
“Pleasure has its time; so, too, has wisdom. Make love in thy youth, and in old age, attend to thy salvation.”
A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness(1902) | p. 50 -
“I do not know in the whole history of the world a hero, a worthy man, a prophet, a true Christian, who has not been the victim of the jealous, of a scamp, or of a sinister spirit.”
A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness(1902) | p. 52 -
“Use, do not abuse; as the wise man commands. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.”
1730s | "Cinquième discours: sur la nature de plaisir", Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738) -
“We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.”
1750s | Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750) A variation on this remark can be found in the same notebook: Men who look for happiness are like drunkards who cannot find their house but know that they have one [ Les homm -
“Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.”
1760s | Letter to Pierre-Joseph Luneau de Boisjermain (21 October 1769), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1882], vol. XIV, letter # 7692 (p. 478) -
“Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: a very stupid daughter of a very wise mother.”
A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness(1902) | p. 111 -
“Where is the prince sufficiently educated to know that for seventeen hundred years the Christian sect has done nothing but harm?”
1760s | Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), transl. Richard Aldington , letter 160 from Voltaire to Frederick II of Prussia, 6 April 1767 [10] -
“No oaths, no seals, no official mummeries were used; the treaty was ratified on both sides with a yea, yea — the only one, says Voltaire, that the world has known, never sworn to and never broken.”
The History of the Quakers (1762) | As quoted in William Penn: An Historical Biography (1851) by William Hepworth Dixon