Voltaire

But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?[Written after an earthquake in Lisbon killed over 15,000 people]

She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying.

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

Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.

The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

Injustice in the end produces independence.

Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.

when man was put into the garden of eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.

Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: "I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.

Men employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

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.

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.

Wisdom must yield to superstition's rules,Who arms with bigot zeal the hand of fools.

had no need of a guide to learn ignorance

He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. "We do not pray to him at all," said the reverend sage. "We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.