Voltaire

“ The voyager was moved with pity for the small human race, where he was discovering such surprising contrasts.
"Since you are amongst the small number of wise men," he told these sirs, "and since apparently you do not kill anyone for money, tell me, I beg of you, what occupies your time."
"We dissect flies," said the philosopher, "we measure lines, we gather figures; we agree with each other on two or three points that we do not understand."
It suddenly took the Sirian and the Saturnian's fancy to question these thinking atoms, to learn what it was they agreed on. ”

“ The sun, in truth, or rather the Earth, makes a similar voyage in a day; but you have to imagine that the going is much easier when one turns on one's axis instead of walking on one's feet. So there they were, back where they started, after having seen the nearly imperceptible pond we call the Mediterranean, and the other little pool that, under the name Ocean, encircles the molehill. The dwarf never got in over his knees, and the other hardly wet his heels. On their way they did all they could to see whether the planet was inhabited or not. ”

“ The Cartesian took the floor and said: "The soul is a pure spirit that has received in the belly of its mother all metaphysical ideas, and which, leaving that place, is obliged to go to school, and to learn all over again what it already knew, and will not know again."
"It is not worth the trouble," responded the animal with the height of eight leagues, "for your soul to be so knowledgeable in its mother's stomach, only to be so ignorant when you have hair on your chin. ”

“ Micromegas, a much better observer than his dwarf, clearly saw that the atoms were speaking to each other, and pointed this out to his companion, who, ashamed of being mistaken about them reproducing, did not want to believe that such a species could communicate. He had the gift of language as well as the Sirian. He could not hear the atoms talk, and he supposed that they did not speak. Moreover, how could these impossibly small beings have vocal organs, and what would they have to say? To speak, one must think, more or less ”

“ I affirm nothing, and content myself with believing that many more things are possible than one would think."
The animal from Sirius smiled. He did not find this the least bit sage, while the dwarf from Saturn would have kissed the sectarian of Locke were it not for the extreme disproportion. But there was, unfortunately, a little animalcule in a square hat who interrupted all the other animalcule philosophers. ”

“ Imagine something that can hold the Earth in its hands, and which has organs in proportion to ours--and it may very well be that there are such things--conceive, I beg of you, what these things would think of the battles that allow a vanquisher to take a village only to lose it later. ”

“ At this all the philosophers shook their heads, and one of them, more frank than the others, avowed that if one excepts a small number of inhabitants held in poor regard, all the rest are an assembly of mad, vicious, and wretched people. "We have more substance than is necessary," he said, "to do evil, if evil comes from substance; and too much spirit, if evil comes from spirit. ”

“ To tell the truth, what really makes me think it is uninhabited is that it seems that no one of good sense would want to stay."
"Well," said Micromegas, "maybe the inhabitants of this planet are not of good sense! ”

“ One of the philosophers responded that he could certainly imagine that there are intelligent beings much smaller than man. He recounted, not every fabulous thing Virgil says about bees, but what Swammerdam discovered, and what Reaumur has anatomized. He explained finally that there are animals that are to bees what bees are to man, what the Sirian himself was for the vast animals he had spoken of, and what these large animals are to other substances before which they looked like atoms. ”

“ Finally Micromegas said to them, "Since you know what is exterior to you so well, you must know what is interior even better. Tell me what your soul is, and how you form ideas." The philosophers spoke all at once as before, but they were of different views. The oldest cited Aristotle, another pronounced the name of Descartes; this one here, Malebranche; another Leibnitz; another Locke. An old peripatetic spoke up with confidence: "The soul is an entelechy, and a reason gives it the power to be what it is." This is what Aristotle expressly declares, page 633 of the Louvre edition. ”

“ The microscope, which could barely distinguish a whale from a boat, could not capture anything as elusive as a man. I do not claim to outrage anyone's vanity, but I am obliged to ask that important men make an observation here. Taking the size of a man to be about five feet, the figure we strike on Earth is like that struck by an animal of about six hundred thousandths [2] the height of a flea on a ball five feet around. ”

“ Upon leaving Jupiter they traversed a space of around one hundred million leagues and approached the planet Mars, which, as we know, is five times smaller than our own; they swung by two moons that cater to this planet but have escaped the notice of our astronomers. I know very well that Father Castel will write, perhaps even agreeably enough, against the existence of these two moons; but I rely on those who reason by analogy. These good philosophers know how unlikely it would be for Mars, so far from the sun, to have gotten by with less than two moons. ”

“ She was a pretty, petite brunette who was only 660 fathoms tall, but who compensated for this small size with many other charms.
"Cruelty!" she cried, "after resisting you for 1,500 years, just when I was beginning to come around, when I'd spent hardly a hundred [1] years in your arms, you leave me to go on a voyage with a giant from another world; go, you're only curious, you've never been in love: if you were a true Saturnian, you would be faithful. ”

“ Pascal became a very great geometer, not in the same class as those that contributed to the progress of science with great discoveries, like Descartes, Newton, but certainly ranked among the geometers, whose works display a genius of the first order. ”

“ Know that even if they have not drawn swords, hunger, fatigue, or intemperance will overtake them. Furthermore, it is not they that should be punished, it is those sedentary barbarians who from the depths of their offices order, while they are digesting their last meal, the massacre of a million men, and who subsequently give solemn thanks to God. ”

“ The Sirian shuddered, and asked the reason for these horrible quarrels between such puny animals.
"It is a matter," said the philosopher, "of some piles of mud as big as your heel [2] . It is not that any of these millions of men that slit each other's throats care about this pile of mud. ”

“ English savant, author of Astro-Theology, and several other works that seek to prove the existence of God through detailing the wonders of nature: unfortunately he and his imitators are often mistaken in their explanation of these wonders; they rave about the wisdom that is revealed in a phenomenon, but one soon discovers that the phenomenon is completely different than they supposed ”

“ He built a strong friendship with the secretary of the academy of Saturn, a spirited man who had not invented anything, to tell the truth, but who understood the inventions of others very well, and who wrote some passable verses and carried out some complicated calculations. ”

“ We know that a flock of philosophers was at this time returning from the Arctic Circle, where they had made some observations, which no one had dared make up to then. The gazettes claimed that their vessel ran aground on the coast of Bothnia, and that they were having a lot of difficulty setting things straight; but the world never shows its cards. ”

“ Nothing in nature is simpler or more orderly. The sovereign states of Germany or Italy, which one can traverse in a half hour, compared to the empires of Turkey, Moscow, or China, are only feeble reflections of the prodigious differences that nature has placed in all beings.
[2] This is how the text reads in the first editions. Others, in place of "geometers," put "algebraists." B.
His excellency's size being as great as I have said, all our sculptors and all our painters will agree without protest that his belt would have been 50,000 feet around, which gives him very good proportions. ”

“ Micromegas, inhabitant of the country of Sirius, is 24,000 paces tall, which is equivalent to 20,000 feet, and since we citizens of the earth are hardly five feet tall, and our sphere 9,000 leagues around ”