Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778), popularly known simply as Voltaire, was a great French "persifleur" and "Coryphæus of Deism," born in Paris, son of a lawyer. He was trained to scoff at religion from his boyhood, and began his literary career as a satirist and in the production of lampoons which cost him twice over imprisonment in the Bastille, on his release from which he left France in 1726 and went to England, where he stayed three years, and got acquainted with the free-thinking class there.On his return to Paris he engaged in some profitable commercial speculations and published his "Charles XII," which he had written in England, and retired to the château of Cirey, where he lived five years with Madame du Châtelet, engaged in study and diligent with his pen, with whom he left France and went to Poland, after her death paying his famous visit to Frederick the Great, with whom before three years were out he quarrelled, and from whom he was glad to escape, making his head-quarters eventually within the borders of France at Ferney, from which he now and again visited Paris, where on his last visit he was received with such raptures of adulation that he was quite overcome, and had to be conveyed home to die, giving up the ghost exactly two months after.
He was a man of superlative adroitness of faculty and shiftiness, without aught that can be called great, but more than any other the incarnation of the spirit of his time. He said the word which all were waiting to hear and who replied yea to it — a poor word indeed yet a potent, for it gave the death-blow to superstition, but left religion out in the cold. The general, the great offence Carlyle charges Voltaire with is, that "he intermeddled in religion without being himself in any measure religious; that he entered the Temple and continued there with a levity which, in any temple where men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently, and with long-continued effort, warred against Christianity, without understanding, beyond the mere superficies, what Christianity was".
Wisdom & Quotes
- Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
- Dictionnaire philosophique, 'Art Dramatique'
- Common sense is not so common.
- Quoi que vous fassiez, ecrasez l'infame, et aimez qui vous aime.
- letter to d'Alembert, Nov 28, 1762
- Love truth, but pardon error.
- May God defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.
- If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
- If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment.
- God is always on the side of the big battalions.
- It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
- History is no more than the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.
- History can be well written only in a free country.
- This agglomeration which was called and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire in any way.
- Love those who love you.
- They squeeze the orange and throw away the peel.
- I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
- In this country we find it pays to shoot an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.
- The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.
- The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.
- Virtue, study, and gaiety are three sisters who should not be separated.
- He who is only wise lives a sad life.
- Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.
Du Deffand