Voltaire

“ I knew the man again who had flung me into prison for not having paid my twenty crowns, and throwing myself at the feet of the comptroller-general, I implored his justice; upon which he burst out a-laughing, and telling me it was a trick that had been played me, he ordered the doers of this mischief in jest to pay me a hundred crowns damages, and exempted me from the land-tax for the rest of my life. ”

“ If she makes any fresh attempts to gain entrance into Italy it is thought she will begin by establishing herself at Venice; and that she will take up her abode in the kingdom of Naples, in spite of the liquefaction of the saint's blood in that country, which awakens in her mind mournful reflections on human credulity. It is pretended that she has an infallible secret for untying the strings of a crown, which are entangled, nobody knows how, in those of a mitre. ”

“ He cries up the fine houses built by the monks, and it is precisely those fine houses that provoke the rest of the subjects; it is the very cause of complaint to all Europe. The vow of poverty condemns those palaces, as the vow of humility protests against pride, and as the vow of extinguishing one's race is in opposition to nature. ”

“ Sir, you have tried to enlighten the cockneys of Paris on a point of the greatest concern to mankind: that of the duration of human life. It is to you alone that the ministry owes its knowledge of the due rate of annuities for lives, according to different ages. ”

“ I have inherited from an uncle his fortune of eight millions, which he got at Cadiz and at Surat; I have not a foot of land; my estate lies in government contracts and in the funds. I owe the state nothing. It is for you to give half of your substance—you who are a proprietor of land. Do you not see that if the minister of the revenue were to require anything of me in aid of our country, he would be a blockhead that could not calculate? for everything is the produce of the land. ”

“ The soldier, as a good subject ought to do, marries, and fights for his wife and children. Would it were the will of heaven that every laborer was a soldier and a married man! They would make excellent subjects. But a monk, merely in his quality of a monk, is good for nothing but to devour the substance of his countrymen. There is no truth more generally acknowledged. ”

“ It is time to give some relief to the people, who, without our care, and our equity, would have nothing to live upon, in this world at least, however they might fare in the other."
Some, of profound genius, presented projects to him. One of them had imagined a scheme to lay a tax on wit. "All the world," said he, "will be eager to pay, as no one cares to pass for a fool."
The minister declared to him, "I exempt you from the tax." ”

“ He feels but too sensible, that while they are, jure divino, robbing him of his tenth sheaf, they have the diabolical cruelty not to give him credit for all that it will have cost him to make that sheaf grow. What then remains to him for himself and family? Tears, want, discouragement, despair, and thus he dies of fatigue and misery. If the vicar were paid by the country, he would be a comfort to his parishioners, instead of being looked on by them as their enemy. ”

“ It is right to favor industry, but opulent industry ought to contribute to support the state. This industry will have certainly taken from you a part of your one hundred and twenty livres, and appropriated that part to itself, in selling you your shirts and your coat twenty times dearer than they would have cost you if you had made them yourself. The manufacturer who shall have enriched himself at your expense will, I allow, have also paid wages to his workmen, who had nothing of themselves ”

“ But notwithstanding all the progress of the human understanding, there are few that read, and among those who sometimes seek instruction, the reading for the most part is very ill chosen. My neighbors, men and women, pass their time, after dinner, at playing an English game, which I have much difficulty to pronounce, since they call it whist. Many good citizens, many thick heads, who take themselves for good heads, tell you, with an air of importance, that books are good for nothing. ”

“ Heaven preserve us from paying a single farthing! It is only the produce of the land, cultivated by laborious hands, callous with work, and moistened with tears, that owes taxes to the legislative and executive power. ”

“ Every time that it can be said of any condition of life whatever, that if all the world were to embrace it mankind would perish, it is proved that that condition is a worthless one, and that whoever embraces it does all the mischief to mankind that in him lies. ”

“ A geometrician demonstrates to you that between a circle and a tangent you may thread a number of curves, and yet cannot get one straight line to pass. Your eyes, your reason, tell you the contrary. The geometrician gravely answers you that it is an infinitesimal of the second order. You stare in stupid silence and quit the field all astonished, without having any clear idea, without comprehending anything, and without having any reply to make. ”

“ Those pitiful creatures will say more stupidly abusive things in one pamphlet of two pages than the best company in Paris can say agreeable and instructive ones in a supper of four hours. And what is stranger yet, they dare not tell a man to his face what they have the impudence to print. ”

“ Another cause of our poverty lies in our new wants. We pay our neighbors four millions of livres on one article, and five or six upon another; such, for example, as a stinking powder for stuffing up our noses, brought from America. Our coffee, tea, chocolate, cochineal, indigo, spices, cost us above sixty millions a year. All these were unknown to us in the reign of Henry IV., except the spices, of which, however, the consumption was not so great as it is now. ”

“ Naturally and philosophically speaking, it is impossible for one real line to penetrate another. No curve, nor no right line, can pass between two real lines that touch one another. These theorems that puzzle you are but sports of the imagination, ideal chimeras, whereas true geometry is the art of measuring things actually existent. ”

“ It is because our prejudices are ancient, and our morality new; it is because we are as penetrated with our opinions as we are inattentive to our ideas; it is because our passion for pleasures hinders us from reflecting on our wants, and that we are more eager to live than to direct ourselves right; it is, in a word, because our morals are gentle without being good; it is because we are polite, and are not so much as humane."
These fragments, which eloquence had dictated to humanity, filled the heart of my friend with a sweet consolation. ”

“ The monkish life, whatever they may say, is not at all to be envied. It is a maxim well known that the monks are a kind of people who assemble without knowing, live without loving, and die without regretting each other. ”

“ These are partly the causes of our poverty—a poverty which we hide under varnished ceilings, or with the help of our dealers in fashion. We are poor with taste. There are some officers of revenue, there are contractors or jobbers, there are merchants, very rich; their children, their sons-in-law, are also very rich ”

“ A woman, industrious and a good economist, will do more good in a house than a daughter of a farmer of the revenue, who spends more in superfluities than she will have brought of income to her husband. ”

“ The Man of Forty Crowns.—Well! granted, then, that I shall have been duly industrious; that all my countrymen will have been so too; and that the legislative and executive power shall have received a good round tax; how much will the nation have gained at the end of the year?
The Geometrician.—Nothing at all, unless it shall have carried on a profitable foreign trade. But life will have been more agreeable in it. Every one will, respectively, in proportion, have had more clothes, more linen, more movables than he had before. There will have been in the nation a more abundant circulation. ”

“ He was preparing to make a just war, and by amassing in his coffers twenty-two millions of the currency of that time, besides which he had twenty more to receive, which he left in circulation, he spared the people above a hundred millions that it would have cost if he had not taken those useful measures. He made himself morally sure of success against an enemy who had not taken the like precaution. ”

“ Now, it being a clear consequence that if all the youth of both sexes were to shut themselves up in cloisters the world would perish, monkery is, if it were but in that light alone, the enemy to human nature, independently of the horrid evils it has formerly caused. ”

“ Andrew improve in vigor from the time he procured a library! He lives with books as with men, and is careful in his choice of them. What a pleasure it is to gain instruction, to enlarge one's mind by studying the best works of the greatest authors.
He congratulates himself on being born at a time when human reason is tending toward perfection. ”

“ Let a humpbacked old woman present herself to enter into a cloister, and she will be rejected with contempt, unless she will give an immense portion to the house. But what do I say? Every nun must bring her dower with her; she is else the refuse of the convent. Never was there a more intolerable abuse.
Question.—Thank you, sir. I swear to you that no daughter of mine shall be a nun. They shall learn to spin, to sew, to make lace, to embroider, to render themselves useful. I look upon the vows of convents to be crimes against one's country and one's self. ”

“ The minister of the revenue said to him, "I see how charitable you are."
A farmer-general, extremely well-skilled in assessments, interposed, saying:
"Sir, that village can afford nothing to this monk, as I have, but the last year, made the parishioners pay thirty-two taxes on their wine, besides their overconsumption of the allowance for their own drinking. They are entirely ruined. I have seized and sold their cattle and movables, and yet they are still my debtors. ”

“ The alms which have been bestowed upon us have enabled us to build those houses by the rent of which we get a hundred thousand livres a year. But these alms, coming from the fruits of the earth, and having, consequently, already paid the tax, ought not to pay twice. They have sanctified the faithful believers, who have impoverished themselves to enrich us, and we continue to beg charity, and to lay under contribution the Faubourg of St. Germain in order to sanctify a still greater number of the faithful believers. ”

“ What would England do at this time, if, instead of forty thousand seamen, it had forty thousand monks? The more they are multiplied, the greater need there is of a number of industrious subjects. There are undoubtedly buried in the cloisters many talents which are lost to the state. To make a kingdom flourish, there should be the fewest priests and the most artisans possible. ”

“ Healths were drunk to the philosophical empress, to the royal philosopher, and to the philosophical primate, with the wish of their having many imitators. Even the doctors of Sorbonne admired them, for there are some persons of good sense in that body, as there were formerly some men of wit among the Bœotians. ”

“ In short, he laughed so heartily that I could not help laughing also, without knowing at what. So true it is, that man is born an imitative animal, that instinct rules us, and that the great emotions of the soul are catching. ”

“ What was not talked of at this supper—of which I shall long retain the remembrance? It was also in course to say a word of the actors and actresses, that eternal subject of the table-talk of Versailles and of Paris. It was agreed that a good declaimer was as rare as a good poet. For my part, I must own that Plato's banquet could not have given me more pleasure than that of Monsieur and Madame Andrew.
Our very pretty gentlemen and our very fine ladies would, doubtless, have found it dull, and been tired with it. They pretend to be the only good company ”

“ On this we concluded that weakness and a frivolous turn of mind are the causes of this preference; that Charles XII. was the Don Quixote, and Peter, the Solon of the North; that superficial understandings prefer a wild, extravagant heroism to the great views of a legislator; that the particulars of the foundation of a town are less pleasing to them than the rashness of a man who, at the head of only his domestics, braves an army of ten thousand Turks; and that, in short, most readers love amusement better than instruction. ”

“ It sometimes happens that a man has no answer to make, and yet is not persuaded. He is overthrown without the feeling of being convinced. He feels at the bottom of his heart a scruple, a repugnance, which hinders him from believing what has been proved to him. ”

“ He has not that sort of wit which seems to aim at stifling that of others. The authority which he conciliates to himself is due to nothing but his graceful manner, to his moderation, and to a round, good-natured face, which is quite persuasive. ”