Voltaire1694–1778If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
Candide (1759)In contextWhen it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
Letter to Mme. d’Épinal, Ferney (26 December 1760) from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance (Garnier frères, Paris, 1881), vol. IX, letter # 4390 (p. 124)Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
L’Ingénu, ch.10 (1767)Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.
Letter to Élie Bertrand (5 January 1759)It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750)- Le Dernier Volume Des Œuvres De Voltaire: Contes — Comédie — Pensées -— Poésies — Lettres (1862)
- Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, Chapter 70 (1756)
- 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
- “Charity” (1770)
- “Whether it is useful to maintain the people in superstition,” Treatise on Toleration (1763)
- “Civil and Ecclesiastical Laws”, Dictionnaire philosophique (1785-1789)
- “Tolerance” (1764)
- Brutus, act II, scene I (1730)
- “Fatherland” (1764)
Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.
Letter to Pierre-Joseph Luneau de Boisjermain (21 October 1769)
