"Voltaire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... followers maintained him in luxury. Several of them appeared at the bar to countenance him when he was tried at the Horsham assizes. So long did this delusion last that, when George the Third had been some years on the English throne, Voltaire thought it necessary gravely to confute the hypothesis that the man in the iron mask was the Duke of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Acts, both passed the same session, have, I think, most merit. The Fable of Jotham, or the Borough Hunters, does not make up by ingenuity for what it wants in reverence. In the Fakeer, a tale professedly borrowed from Voltaire, the story takes a less humorous turn than as it is told in the extracts from Pere Le ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... repeated proofs of his genius he had put before his friends. It was something more than mere personal intimacy that justified the rebuke he administered to Reynolds, when the latter painted an allegorical picture representing the triumph of Beattie and Truth over Voltaire and Scepticism. "It very ill becomes a man of your eminence and character," he said, "to debase so high a genius as Voltaire before so mean a writer as Beattie. Beattie and his book will be forgotten in ten years, while Voltaire's fame will last for ever. Take care it does not perpetuate this ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... made a fast friend of Dryden—grown mellow, indeed, but by no means beggared of his fire—on his first coming to town, nor kept the intimacy of Swift, nor avoided the fault-finding of Dennis. It is quite unnecessary to suppose that Congreve's famous remark to Voltaire, that he wished to be visited as a plain gentleman, was the remark (if it was made) of a snob: it was clearly a legitimate deprecation, spoken by a man who had written nothing notable for twenty-six years, which Voltaire misunderstood in a moment of ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... soldier, Marlborough had no equal. Voltaire says of him with truth that "he never besieged a fortress which he did not take, nor fought a battle which he did not win." This man, at once so able and so false, to whom war was a private speculation rather than a contest for right ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... fragrant spring morning following the discovery of the execrated Voltaire, the little Jose, tightly clutching his father's hand, threaded the narrow Sierpes and crossed the Prado de San Sebastian, once the Quemador, where the Holy Inquisition was wont to purge heresy from human souls with fire. The father shuddered, and his stern face grew ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... such supreme excellence that society has forgotten his vice or forgiven the faults that marred his rare gifts. What genius had De Quincey! Marvelous the myriad-minded Coleridge! The opium-habit, however, was a vice that eclipsed their fame and robbed them of half their rightful influence. Voltaire's style was so faultlessly perfect that if the sentences lying across his page had been strings of pearls they could have been no more beautiful. But Voltaire's excesses make a black mark across the ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... p. 136 Voltaire, upon what authority we know not, tells us, that during the capitulation the German and Catalonian troops found means to climb over the ramparts into the city, and began to commit the most barbarous excesses. The viceroy complained to Peterborough that his soldiers had taken an unfair advantage ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... speaks of his hope to do so in the "Preface." As a matter of fact, he produced a version of L'Avare at Drury Lane in the following year, which entirely outshone the older versions of Shadwell and Ozell, and gained from Voltaire the praise of having added to the original "quelques beautes de dialogue particulieres a sa (Fielding's) nation." Lovegold, its leading role, became a stock part. It was well played by its first actor Griffin, and was a favourite exercise with ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... interested in the subject will find some admirable observations in Lessing's Hamburger Dramaturgie, 11tes. and 12tes. Stueck, where the critic compares the ghost of Ninus in Voltaire's Semiramis with the ghost in Hamlet. He condemns the former because it is nothing more than a poetical machine, while Shakespeare's is one of the persons of the drama. His position is essentially ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... had impertinently inserted in the sixth volume a protest against a certain foot-note, in which Comte had used some hard words about M. Arago. Comte threw himself into the suit with an energy worthy of Voltaire, and he won it. Third, and worst of all, he had prefixed a preface to the sixth volume, in which he deliberately went out of his way to rouse the active enmity of the very men on whom depended his annual ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... rather curious that the story of Merope should have been so tempting as, to mention nothing else, Maffei's attempt in Italian, Voltaire's in French, and this of Mr Arnold's in English, show it to have been to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the Classical drama: and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind. For the fact is that the donnee is very much more of the Romantic than of the Classical description, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... of the Wife of Bath: story of the young knight saved by an old sorceress, whom he marries and who recovers her youth and beauty; the first original of this old legend is not known; same story in Gower (Story of Florent), and in Voltaire: "Ce qui plait aux Dames."—Friar's tale: a summoner taken away by the devil, from one of the old collections of exempla.—Tale of the Summoner (somnour, sompnour): a friar ill-received by a moribund; a coarse, popular story, a version of which is ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... twaddlers. And when a man arises with a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of this inculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses of our humbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked and scandalized, even when we cannot help laughing. Worse, we dread and persecute those who can see and declare the truth, because their sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness. ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... rapacious underlings, who conveyed the grievance into every corner of the land. These people became a hated and oppressive class, like the farmers of the revenue in France. According to a well-known anecdote, Voltaire, when in a company, each member of which had to tell some tragic story, was called upon in his turn. He said: 'There was once a farmer-general—you know the rest!' The same might have been said of the monopolists in the time of King James. One of them, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... visit France, but I have always turned a deaf ear, and will resist it as long as possible." "Who, sire, is the king so unfortunate as to banished by you from your majesty's presence?" "Who? The king of philosophers, the rival of Voltaire, my brother of Prussia. Ah, my dear baronne, he is a bad fellow; he detests me, and I have no love for him. A king does wisely, certainly, to submit his works to the judgment of a Freron! It would be outrageous scandal if he came here. Great and ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... orthodox Louis Empaytaz was suffering the rebuke of the Swiss church authorities for his "Considerations upon the Divinity of Jesus Christ." Aside from this, all the parson's notions of French religion and of French philosophy were of the most aggravated degree of bitterness. That set of Voltaire, which the Major, his father, had once purchased, had not been without its fruit,—not legitimate, indeed, but most decided. The books so cautiously put out of sight—like all such—had caught the attention ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... theories included different combinations of elements of ancient lineage. Digby's concept was essentially free of vitalistic coloring; akin to the embryological efforts of Descartes in its virtual independence from observations of the developing embryo, it was similarly vulnerable to Voltaire's criticism of Descartes, that he sought to interpret, rather than study, Nature. This criticism is not so applicable to Highmore, whose theory of development is more vitalistic than Digby's, and is more akin to the concepts developed ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... that Aunt Elizabeth had discountenanced it. People were horrified by French novels in those days. Rousseau and Voltaire had been held in some degree responsible for the terrible French Revolution. And people shuddered at the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... 1761 he continued busily to ply his pen. Besides his contributions to 'The Ledger' and 'The British Magazine', he edited 'The Lady's Magazine', inserting in it the 'Memoirs of Voltaire', drawn up some time earlier to accompany a translation of the 'Henriade' by his crony and compatriot Edward Purdon. Towards the beginning of 1762 he was hard at work on several compilations for Newbery, for whom he wrote or edited a 'History of Mecklenburgh', ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... enjoyment as flowers to light, on the voluptuous indulgence of the Italian, or the contented apathy of the Hindoo. In the mighty organization of good and evil, what can we vain individuals effect? They who labour most, how doubtful is their reputation! Who shall say whether Voltaire or Napoleon, Cromwell or Caesar, Walpole or Pitt, has done most good or most evil? It is a question casuists may dispute on. Some of us think that poets have been the delight and the lights of men; another school of philosophy has treated ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... settled on a farm near by; another was still a boy. His mother lived upon the paternal farm; and with her lived her son John, who ploughed, hunted, fished, and rode, in the manner of the farmers' sons in that country. At eighteen he could read, write, and cipher; he had read Rollin, Robertson, Voltaire's Charles XII., Brown's Essays, Captain Cook, and parts of Locke. This, according to his own account, was the sum of his knowledge, except that he had fully imbibed his father's decided republican opinions. He shared to some degree ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the celebrated residence of Voltaire, six miles from Geneva, is a place of very little picturesque beauty: its broad front is turned to the high road, without any regard to the prospect, and the garden is adorned with cut trees, parapet walls with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... sometimes ran away with him, his pen possessed extraordinary facility. Thus he was ever able to put his best foot foremost. Never in the larger sense a leader of men as were Chatham and Fox, as were Washington, Clay and Lincoln; nor of ideas as were Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin, he had the subtle tenacity of Louis the Eleventh of France, the keen foresight of Richelieu with a talent for the surprising which would have raised him to eminence in journalism. In short he was an opportunist void of conviction ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... advantage that within another century the English Idea of political life was able to react most powerfully upon continental Europe. It was the study of English institutions by such men as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau, that gave shape and direction to the French Revolution. That violent but wholesome clearing of the air, that tremendous political and moral awakening, which ushered in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... putting in a plea here for demons and fairies, as Voltaire does in the above exquisite lines; nor about to expatiate on the beauties of error, for it has none; but the clank of steam-engines, and the shouts of politicians, and the struggle for gain or bread, and the loud denunciations ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... wasted existence, Lilienblum probes and exposes the depths of his tortured conscience, at the same time following up inexorably the steps which remove the free-thinker from the faithful believer, without, however, reaching a real or positive result— in the spirit at once of Rousseau and Voltaire. [Footnote 1: Literally, "one who is opposed" [to the mystical system of Hasidism]; a protestant, a Puritan.] As he ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to the figures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inherent in every people, and is more or less characteristic of every nation. Cervantes among the Spaniards, the Abbate Casti among the Italians, Jean Paul Richter among the Germans, Voltaire among the French, Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, and Dr. John Wolcot among the English, Jonathan Swift among the Irish, and Robert Burns among the Scotch, have introduced humorous writing into the literature of their ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... left-handed a compliment prompts the suspicion that, after all, what appears to be eulogy is in reality nothing more than an essay in adroitly dissembled obloquy. Mutatis mutandis, Mr. SHAW would not thank Sir EDWARD ELGAR for calling him, for example, the Voltaire de nos jours. What he does enjoy is the frank disparagement of Mr. WILFRID BLUNT, who describes him in the second volume of My Diary, just published, as "an ugly fellow, his face a pasty-white, with a red nose and a rusty red ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... Canada was a more thorny problem. The colony had not been sought by its conquerors for itself. It was counted of little worth. The verdict of its late possessors, as recorded in Voltaire's light farewell to "a few arpents of snow," might be discounted as an instance of sour grapes; but the estimate of its new possessors was evidently little higher, since they debated long and dubiously whether in the peace settlement ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... volume and "Don Juan" in another, both royal octavo editions, slightly stained, but bound in full calf. He bought them. He knew that to keep his resolutions he must read a lot of poetry. Then he saw Voltaire's prose tales in four volumes, in French,—an enchanting Didot edition, with ink as black as Hades and paper as white as snow; also bound in full calf. He bought them. And then the proprietor showed him, in eight similar volumes, Voltaire's "Dictionnaire Philosophique." He did not want it; but it ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... one daren't beat any one before him; he doesn't want to go into the government service; he's weakly, as you see, in health; fie upon him, the milksop! And all this because he's got his head full of Voltaire." The old man had a special dislike to Voltaire, and the "fanatic" Diderot, though he had not read a word of their words; reading was not in his line. Piotr Andreitch was not mistaken; his son's head for that matter was indeed full of both Diderot and ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... large sum to one who had not wherewithal to buy a morsel of bread; and as I looked at it over and over, I fancied there would be no end to the pleasures such wealth could purchase. I can breakfast on the Quai Voltaire, thought I, ay, and sumptuously too, with coffee, and chestnuts, and a slice of melon, and another of cheese, and a "petite goutte" to finish, for five sous. The panther, at the corner of the Pont Neuf, costs but a sou; and for three ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... began to build a fleet of beautiful ships for the China and India trade, their names, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau, revealing his ideas of religion and liberty. So successfully did he combine banking and shipping that in 1813 he was believed to be the wealthiest merchant in the United States. In that year one of his ships ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... the best of them, appear to have had difficulty in discerning any nobler arena for the religious sentiment than the social one. "Religion," says Matthew Arnold, "is conduct." It is the power "which makes for righteousness." "As civil law," said Voltaire, "enforces morality in public, so the use of religion is to compel it in private life." "A complete morality," observes a contemporary Christian writer, "meets all the practical ends of religion."[250-1] In such expressions ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... and gay, telling him of her intended action in making arrangements to free herself from her empty marriage bonds, and apparently contemplating a new life with Lord Fordyce with satisfaction. Pere Anselme was a great student of Voltaire and looked upon his tale of "Zadig" as one from which much benefit could be derived. And now he began to put the method of this citizen of Babylon into practice, never having heard of ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... a class of hypothetical creations which do not belong to my subject, because they are acknowledged to be fictions, as those of Lucian,[177] Rabelais,[178] Swift, Francis {103} Godwin,[179] Voltaire, etc. All who have more positive notions as to either the composition or organization of other worlds, than the reasonable conclusion that our Architect must be quite able to construct millions of other ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... depressing calm of a careworn man who cannot foresee how things will result. The days were long at the Kremlin while the Emperor awaited Alexander's reply, which never came. At this time I noticed that the Emperor kept constantly on his table Voltaire's ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... affairs, going through the harmless follies of a ceremonial reception by the Rosati, taking three deep breaths over a rose, solemnly fastening the emblem to his coat, emptying a glass of rose-red wine at a draught to the good health of the company, and finally reciting couplets that Voltaire would have found almost as detestable as the Law of Prairial or the Festival of the Supreme Being. More laudable efforts of ambition were prize essays, in which Robespierre has the merit of taking the right side in important questions. He protested against the inhumanity ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... he says, he never was able to convince any one. After a new world had been discovered, many scattered indications were then found to have foreshown it. "When he promised a new hemisphere," writes Voltaire, "people maintained that it could not exist, and when he had discovered it, that it had been known a long time." It was to confute such detractors that he resorted to the well known expedient for making an ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... Hell, insatiate power! Destroyer of the human race, Whose iron scourge and maddening hour Exalt the bad, the good debase; When first to scourge the sons of earth, Thy sire his darling child designed, Gallia received the monstrous birth, Voltaire informed thine infant mind. Well-chosen nurse, his sophist lore, He bade thee many a year explore, He marked thy progress firm though slow, And statesmen, princes, leagued with their inveterate foe. Scared at ...
— English Satires • Various
... strongest contrast to his brother. He was methodical and sententious, expressed his opinion on all subjects with the air of a man whose judgment was infallible, and was an ardent disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau. It was very seldom that he entered his father's house, where his opinions on religious subjects shocked and horrified his mother and sister. He lived with an entirely different set, and spent most of his time at the clubs which, in imitation of those ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... Association for Government camps and schools. The list of titles on the following six pages (together with the list of introductions written especially for the Modern Library), indicates that our use of the term "Modern" does not necessarily mean written within the last few years. Voltaire is certainly a modern of moderns, as are Samuel Butler, Francois Villon, Theophile ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... at this day see the momentous issues involved in it, or the greatness of the danger that it averted. The strife that armed all the civilized world began here. "Such was the complication of political interests," says Voltaire, "that a cannon-shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe in a blaze." Not quite. It was not a cannon-shot, but a volley from the hunting-pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... 'tis a sad world, seeing I'm condemned, With many a million others of my kidney. Each continent's Hammed, Japheted and Shemmed With sinners—worldlings like Sir Philip Sidney And scoffers like Voltaire, who thought it bliss To simulate respect for Genesis— Who bent the mental knee as if in prayer, But mocked at Moses underneath his hair, And like an angry gander ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... went in the secret councils of the office. After all, only an English person could have invented that particular form of religion. I always felt that answer would have delighted Voltaire and given him another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... [191] Voltaire tells us that in his tragedy, "Les Guebres," he was generally supposed to have alluded to the Jansenists. I should not be surprised if this story of the Fire worshippers were found capable of a ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... this, we must remember that Europe was then no longer what she was a century before. Almost all her nations had turned from the doctrines of "sound things," and more or less drank deeply of the cup of infidelity, drugged for them by the flattering sophistries of Voltaire. The draught was inebriation, and the wild consequences burst asunder the responsibilities of man to man. The selfish principle ruled, and balance of justice was then seen ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the story of the tyrant Zahhak familiar from Firdausi. The material for the Soirees was drawn largely from Armeno's Peregrinaggio, which purports to be a translation from the Persian, although no original is known to scholars.[76] From these Soirees Voltaire took the material for his Zadig.[77] In most cases, however, all that was Oriental about such stories was the name and the costume. So popular was the Oriental costume that Montesquieu used it for satirizing the Parisians in his Lettres Persanes (1721). Through French ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... divers causes. Let us simplify the question. Is it not, it will be said, the literary representatives of the spirit of doubt who have demanded and founded toleration? Is it not.... But it is not necessary for my supposed questioner to go on. If he is a Frenchman, he will name Voltaire. No doubt, freedom of opinion has been claimed by sceptics. They have served a good cause; let us know how to rejoice in the fact, and not to be unmindful of what there may have been in their work of noble impulses and generous inspirations. Let us remark however that every ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... famous, and is conspicuous among the prints exhibited in the British Museum. It is dated 1526, two years before the death of Duerer, and has helped to extend the fame of the universal scholar and approved man of letters, who in his own age filled a sphere not unlike that of Voltaire in a later century. There is another portrait of Erasmus by Holbein, often repeated, so that two great artists have contributed to his renown. That by Duerer is admired. The general fineness of touch, with the accessories of books and flowers, shows the care in its execution; ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... Immanuel's Machberoth there is much variety of romantic incident. But it is in satire that he reaches his highest level. Love and wine are the frequent burdens of his song, as they are in the Provencal and Italian poetry of his day. Immanuel was something of a Voltaire in his jocose treatment of sacred things, and pietists like Joseph Karo inhibited the study of the Machberoth. Others, too, described his songs as sensuous and his satires as blasphemous. But the devout and earnest piety of some of Immanuel's prayers,—some of them ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... Guadeloupe," said the black, with a good French accent. "In France and in Guadeloupe there is no superstition, and they pay as much regard to the Bible as to the Koran; I am now learning to read in order that I may understand the writings of Voltaire, who, as I am told, has proved that both the one and the other were written with the sole intention of deceiving mankind. O vive la France! where will you find such an enlightened country as France; and where will you find such a plentiful country as France? Only one in ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... organist. There is quite a large library here, but I dare not ask the princess for the key. The prince has several new works; he paid in my presence six gold ducats for ten little volumes of M. Voltaire's works: Voltaire is now the most celebrated writer in France. The princess forbids my reading his books, and I am sure I am quite content. But what I cannot endure is, that I am not permitted to read a romance lately come from Paris, entitled La ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the shameless and selfish infidels and deists, Voltaire, Rosseau, Robespierre and others like them. Paris admires her deistical authors and makes them the objects of hero-worship. They are called "Philosophs," and Bible readers must not stand in their way. Philosophism sits joyful in glittering saloons, ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors, chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with them very cheap, get ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... largely the reflection upon social and political thought of the vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds, and it needed only just such social and political stresses as the coming of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... deep blue waters of Lake Leman, Mr. Linwood, his daughter, and her husband, took up their residence for a short time. For more than three weeks, this little party spent their time in visiting the birth-place of Rousseau, and the former abodes of Byron, Gibbon, Voltaire, De Stael, ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... crossed rods; then a Servetus burnt by Protestant Calvin at Geneva; or a Spinoza cut off from his tribe and people because he could see nothing but God anywhere; and then it was an exiled Rousseau or Voltaire, or a persecuted Bradlaugh; till, in our own day the last sounds of the long fight are dying about us, as fading echoes, in the guise of a few puerile attempts to enforce trivial disabilities on the ground of abstract convictions. The vanguard of humanity has won ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... appeal to the French themselves. Roberval's tragic experience at Cap Rouge had proved a warning. To the average Frenchman of the sixteenth century Canada meant what it afterwards meant to Sully and Voltaire. It was a tract of snow; a land ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and more permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and not on the sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based. Voltaire's saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances is the tomb of great things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly is not true of governments. It is by a multitude of such considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that the framers of policy ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... English public what it even now ignores, the properest way of cooking meat (a propos of kababs) and it "trembles to receive vols. ix. and x. for truly (from a literary point of view, of course, we mean) there seems nothing of which the translator might not be capable"—capable de tout, as said Voltaire of Habbakuk and another agnostic Frenchman of the Prophet Zerubbabel. This was indeed high praise considering the Saturday's sympathy with and affection for the dead level, for the average man; but as an augury of ill it was a brutum fulmen. No. iv. (August 30, '87) ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... delightful French and English works, among which may be mentioned those of the learned Dr. Smollett, of the ingenious Mr. Henry Fielding, of the graceful and fantastic Monsieur Crebillon the younger, whom our immortal poet Gray so much admired, and of the universal Monsieur de Voltaire. Once, when Mr. Crawley asked what the young people were reading, the governess replied "Smollett." "Oh, Smollett," said Mr. Crawley, quite satisfied. "His history is more dull, but by no means so dangerous as that of Mr. Hume. It is history you are reading?" ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... yet, nevertheless, it was at the beginning of the year 1788. We were dining with one of our brethren at the Academy—a man of considerable wealth and genius. The conversation became serious; much admiration was expressed on the revolution in thought which Voltaire had effected, and it was agreed that it was his first claim to the reputation he enjoyed. We concluded that the revolution must soon be consummated; that it was indispensible that superstition and fanaticism should give way to philosophy, and we began to calculate the probability of ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... Paine to pure republicanism in France was Achille Duchatelet, son of the Duke, and grandson of the authoress,—the friend of Voltaire. It was he and Paine who, after the flight of Louis XVI., placarded Paris with the Proclamation of a Republic, given as the first chapter of this volume. An account of this incident is here quoted from Etienne Dumont's "Recollections ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... whose favourite amusement was pinching his leg, which, as the amusement ended in breaking that limb, was worse than the stocks. He also told him the anecdote of Lenny's own gallant countryman, Admiral Byng, whose execution gave rise to Voltaire's celebrated witticism, "En Angleterre on tue un ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... almost wonder, after the little delicacy they(447) have shown, ever arrived to my hands. I dare to say they will not be quite so just to the public; for though I consented that the correspondence with Voltaire should be given to the editors of his works, I am persuaded that there are many passages at least which they will suppress, as very contemptuous to his chief votaries: I mean, of the votaries to his sentiments; for, like ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... boldness and invention as Montaigne did, in creating, in imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished. Style a la Montaigne would, in many respects, be openly at war with that of Voltaire. It could only come into being and flourish in the full freedom of the sixteenth century, in a frank, ingenious, jovial, keen, brave, and refined mind, of an unique stamp, that even for that time, seemed free and somewhat licentious, and that was inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated by the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... parentage, on April 2, 1725; he died at the Chateau of Dux, in Bohemia, on June 4, 1798. In that lifetime of seventy-three years he travelled, as his Memoirs show us, in Italy, France, Germany, Austria, England, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Spain, Holland, Turkey; he met Voltaire at Ferney, Rousseau at Montmorency, Fontenelle, d'Alembert and Crebillon at Paris, George III. in London, Louis XV. at Fontainebleau, Catherine the Great at St. Petersburg, Benedict XII. at Rome, Joseph II. at Vienna, Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci. Imprisoned by the Inquisitors of State in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... not literary, is the modern cafe. Times are so changed since Voltaire, Diderot and the rest sang and shouted in the Cafe Procope—jested, reasoned and made themselves immortal there—there are so many people who have the means to frequent cafes, and there is such an immense floating population, eager, curious and bent on sightseeing, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... Voltaire has used the same expression so long ago as 1763, in his little satiric dialogue La Chapon et la Poularde, where the former, complaining of the treachery of men says, "Ils n'emploient les paroles que pour ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... engraved sheet of paper—a fly-leaf detached from a book of Voltaire. And above the scroll-encompassed title was written in faded ink: "Le Capitaine Vicomte Louis Jean de Contrecoeur du Regiment de la Reine." And under that, in a woman's fine handwriting: "Mon coeur, malgre; mon coeur, se rendre a Contrecoeur, dit ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... be especially noted as significant: Women have always been more attracted to him than men. He is in a peculiar sense the Woman's great poet. There is a type of masculine genius which has always opposed him. Goethe cared little for him; Voltaire laughed at him; Nietzsche called him "an hyaena poetizing ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... location, the Cafe de Procope became the gathering place of many noted French actors, authors, dramatists, and musicians of the eighteenth century. It was a veritable literary salon. Voltaire was a constant patron; and until the close of the historic cafe, after an existence of more than two centuries, his marble table and chair were among the precious relics of the coffee house. His favorite drink is said to have been a mixture of coffee and chocolate. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... wholesome counsel ever before him, he can be more generously appreciative of the genius of Moliere, more justly discerning in his analysis of the spirit of Rousseau,[59] and more free of the puritanical clatter against Voltaire than any of his fellow-critics. With German literature his familiarity was bounded on the one hand by Schiller's "Robbers," on the other by the first part of "Faust," the entire gap between these being filled by the popular versions of Kotzebue's plays and Mme. de Stael's book on Germany. Yet he ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... entitled "Rowland's letting off the humours of the blood in the head vein, 1611." He had also kept up his private correspondence on a scale which I believe never to have been exemplified in the case of any other person who wrote continually for the press—except, perhaps, Voltaire; and, to say nothing of strictly professional duties, he had, as a vast heap of documents now before me proves, superintended from day to day, except during his Hebridean voyage, the still perplexed concerns of the Ballantynes, with a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... prodigious, if it is not quite reciprocal. The other terminus of the comparison is Wieland. Now there is some shadow of a resemblance there. For Wieland had a touch of the comico-cynical in his nature; and it is notorious that he was often called the German Voltaire, which argues some tiger-monkey grin that traversed his features at intervals. Wieland's malice, however, was far more playful and genial than Swift's; something of this is shown in his romance of 'Idris,' and oftentimes in his prose. But what the world knows Wieland by is ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... of the latter, for I do not see it in the first; the subject of it has been taken for music,—it is the Power and Progress of Harmonious Poetry. I think his objection to prefixing a title to it was wrong—that Mr. Cooke published an ode with such a title. If the Louis the Great, whom Voltaire has discovered in Hungary, had not disappeared from history himself, would not Louis Quatorze have annihilated him? I was aware that the second would have darknesses, and prevailed for the insertion of what notes there are, and ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... coming down from the age of Cicero, when set by the side of the living British Constitution, are cold, crude, and insufficient to a degree that makes them deceptive. Take them, for example, as represented, fairly enough, by Voltaire: the picture drawn by him is for us nothing but ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... [Footnote 62: Voltaire's 'Pucelle' is not quite so immaculate as Mr. Southey's 'Joan of Arc', and yet I am afraid the Frenchman has both more truth and poetry too on his side—(they rarely go together)—than our patriotic minstrel, whose first essay ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... we, the free spirits of all the ages, all the classes, and all the races. Those belonging to the remote civilisations of Egypt and the east; the Socrates' and the Lucians of the modern age, such as Thomas More, Erasmus, and Voltaire; those belonging to a distant future, a future which will perchance (looping the loop of time) return to the thought of Asia—the great and the simple, but all free spirits and all brothers, we are but one people. The centuries of the persecutions, the wide world round, have linked ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... Vishnu Sharma for the benefit of his pupils the sons of an Indian Rajah. The Hindu original has been adapted and translated into a number of languages; Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac, Greek and Latin, Persian and Turkish, under a host of names.[FN237] Voltaire[FN238] wisely remarks of this venerable production:—Quand on fait reflexion que presque toute la terre a ete enfatuee de pareils contes, et qu'ils ont fait l'education du genre humain, on trouve les fables ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... companions; the youngest son, Heinrich Floris, possessed, however, in a considerable degree the qualities which his brothers lacked. He possessed intelligence, a strong character, and had great commercial sagacity; at the same time, he took a definite interest in intellectual pursuits, reading Voltaire, of whom he was more or less a disciple, and other French authors, possessing a keen admiration for English political and family life, and furnishing his house after an English fashion. He was a man of fiery temperament and his appearance was scarcely prepossessing; ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... great critic Boileau, who liked him, quarrelled with him, and made up again. Forty years later, Voltaire wrote that the man who did not enjoy Regnard was not capable of appreciating Moliere. Then came M. de La Harpe, the authority in such matters for two generations: he devotes a chapter to Regnard, and calls him the worthy successor of Moliere. And Beranger, in his charming autobiography, an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... M. de Voltaire shows how easily this hypothesis might be overturned; and while one might thus demonstrate that the Parisians are descended from the Greeks, other profound antiquarians might in like manner prove them to be of Egyptian, or even of Arabian extraction; and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... hesitate? What is there surprising in a priest, stopping to talk to a young girl? Is he not her Cure? More than that, her Confessor. Her confessor! Has he still the right to call himself so? And the weather-beaten soldier, the disciple of Voltaire, the malevolent, unmannerly father? Come, another blunder! he sees clearly that he cannot dream of stopping. And then, after what he has done, what would he dare to say? He will pass by therefore rapidly, without even turning his head; she will see him, ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... nightmare until charitable oblivion dulled the memory of the enormous mass of talk. Sir John thinks we should read Confucius, the Hindoo religious poetry, some Persian poetry, Thucydides, Tacitus, Cicero, Homer, Virgil, a little—a very little—Voltaire, Moliere, Sheridan, Locke, Berkeley, George Lewes, Hume, Shakspere, Bunyan, Spenser, Pope, Fielding, Macaulay, Marivaux—Alas, is there any need to pursue the catalogue to the bitter end? Need I mention ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... forgiven him, but for the notable and delightful discovery that it was not he after all, but another and a lesser hand that endeavoured to befoul her shining garments. France has never quarrelled with her Voltaire for a much fouler and ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... English edition of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, article "Inquisition," I find, among other authors on that subject who are quoted, Hiescas Salazar, Mendoca (sic: Query, Salasar y Mendoca?), Fernandez, Placentinus, Marsilius, Grillandus, and Locatus. Can any of your bibliographical friends ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... that he was much pleased with it. We reckoned there would be some inconveniencies and hardships, and perhaps a little danger; but these we were persuaded were magnified in the imagination of every body. When I was at Ferney, in 1764, I mentioned our design to Voltaire. He looked at me, as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, 'You do not insist on my accompanying you?' 'No, sir.' 'Then I am very willing you should go.' I was not afraid that our curious expedition ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... are not out of place in the instance of one who "saw God"; who often "conversed familiarly with Jesus Christ"; who "was" Socrates; who argued conclusions for hours at a time with Moses, with Milton, with Dante, with the Biblical prophets, with Voltaire; who could "see Satan" almost at will—all in vivid conceptions that sprang up in his mind with such force as to set seemingly substantial and even speaking beings before him. In his assumption of the seer, Blake was not a charlatan: he believed fully in his supernatural privileges. To ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... to compromise the safety of his ships by delaying departure. Linois was always a very nervous officer. Decaen stormed, and Linois proposed to call a council of his captains. "A council!" exclaimed Decaen, "I am the council!" It was worthy of what Voltaire attributed to Louis XIV: "l'etat, c'est mois." After sunset Decaen visited the ships of the division in a boat, and warned their captains to get ready to follow the Marengo out of the roadstead of Pondicherry in the darkness. He considered that ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... So Voltaire has said, and the God who is beyond the skies is not nature personified, but a supernatural Personality. It is to this highest Personality that all religions address themselves. It is to bring man into communion with Him that ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... roused in Strindberg a smoldering resentment, which lack of confidence and authority of position had heretofore caused him to repress. He broke out with a burning satire, in novel form, called "The Red Room," the motto of which he made Voltaire's words "Rien n'est si dsagrable ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... Voltaire blew God out of France for a century. But that was because God was still an emotion in his day and not a Frankenstein of logic. He blew up the high priests. But that was because the high priests still had enough ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... regarded Spinozism as the only rational system, indeed as the last word of all speculative metaphysics; for them logical thought necessarily led to pantheism and determinism. In France, after reaching its climax in Voltaire, it ended in materialism, atheism, and fatalism; and in England, where it had developed the empiricism of Locke, it came to grief in the scepticism of Hume. If we can know only our impressions, then rational theology, cosmology, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... periodical frenzies, and the most capricious. Now, it is all agog for a 'shilling sensational'—then it discusses itself hoarse over a one-sided theological novel made up out of theories long ago propounded and exhaustively set forth by Voltaire, and others of his school,—anon it revels in the gross descriptions of shameless vice depicted in an 'accurately translated' romance of the Paris slums,—now it writes thousands of letters to a black man, to sympathize With ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... cupboard, upon the top of which stood a tea-caddy, a workbox, some tumblers, and a decanter full of water; the other side being filled with a bookcase and books. There were two or three pictures on the walls; one was a portrait of Voltaire, another of Lord Bacon, and a third was Albert Durer's St. Jerome. This latter was an heirloom, and greatly prized I could perceive, as it was hung in the place ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... called them, the 'ghost' of wit, the king troubled himself very little. He had an especial admiration for breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length, for the sake of it. Over-niceties wearied him. He would have preferred Rabelais' 'Gargantua' to the 'Zadig' of Voltaire: and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hum-drum pupils! Playing in a charmed and bewitching circle of countesses, surrounded by the luxury and the praise that kills, Chopin is a much more natural figure, yet he gave lessons regularly and appeared to relish them. He had not much taste for literature. He liked Voltaire though he read but little that was not Polish—did he really enjoy Sand's novels?—and when asked why he did not compose symphonies or operas, answered that his metier was the piano, and to it he would stick. He spoke French though with a Polish accent, and also German, but did not care much ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Type-Frenchman of this epoch; as Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French than any other man;—and intrinsically such a mass of manhood too. Mark him well. The National Assembly were all different without that one; nay, he might say with the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... therefore perfectly right when she declaimed against the freedoms and profanities of Voltaire. Clever as they all may be, the world has derived no profit from them; they afford a foundation for nothing. Nay, they have been of the greatest injury, since they have confused men and robbed them of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... he began to intrigue against the court. He was a man of common abilities, greedy of money and power, and scarcely seeking even the decency of a pretext to cover his mean ambition. His chief honor—an honor somewhat equivocal—is, as Voltaire observes, to have been father of the great Conde. Busy with his intrigues, he cared little for colonies and discoveries; and his rank and power were his sole ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... feminine guise, like 'L'Ingenu' of Voltaire, struck, as was Huron, with all that was illogical in our social code; but she did not make, after his fashion, a too literal application of its rules, and knew where to draw the line, if she found herself on the point of making some hazardous remark, declaring frankly: "I was about to say ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... bound to say no, your Holiness. And his conversation, though it is full of the jargon of modern Liberalism, has none of the obscenities of Voltaire." ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... on his early culture, we see that the reform literature of that time was coming almost entirely from France. Active, earnest men everywhere were grasping the theories and phrases of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu, to wield them against every tyranny. Terrible weapons these,—often searing and scarring frightfully those who brandished them,—yet there was not one chance in a thousand that any man who had once made any considerable number of these ideas his own ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... this. He had never come across Voltaire's observation that marriage is responsible for the population because it provides the maximum opportunity with the maximum temptation. But it was beginning to filter slowly into his brain that the ways and means were always available and ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... were in the close keeping of English patricians, some of their consequences were far from being fully evolved; but certain Frenchmen, Voltaire among others, happening to cross the Straits of Dover, returned with them, and, the wretched government of Louis XV being not only too weak to withstand, but even conniving at, the boldness of the new philosophers, the French language, which was then spoken all over Europe, carried with it ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... much of Voltaire's way of thinking about coffee. I don't know but I would agree with Mackintosh, that the measure of a man's brains is the amount of coffee he drinks. I like it in the French style, all but the lait; that destroys the flavor, besides making it despicably weak. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the Bible winks at incest and robbery , murder and slavery, the book is but a tissue of foolish falsehoods; that because Almighty God has not seen proper to reveal Himself in all His supernal splendor to Messrs. Hume and Voltaire, Paine and Ingersoll the world has no good reason for belief in His existence—that because the dead do not come back to us with a diagram of the New Jerusalem it were folly to believe the soul of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... preserves its natural flavour, and is much more efficacious than when mixed with other ingredients. Laugh at the doctors who tell you that hot coffee irritates the stomach and injures the nerves; tell them that Voltaire, Fontenelle, Stacey, and Fourcroy, who were great coffee-drinkers, lived to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... Voltaire's essay on customs a sentence describing the European peasantry of a hundred and fifty years ago as "savages living in cabins with their females and a few animals," and asks, "who would dare to pretend that these words ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... portentous. And if it be true that such publications are what the people most desire, the outlook for our country is dark indeed. The saddest consideration is that the power of the secular press is so vast and far reaching. When Celsus wrote, books were few. When Voltaire, Hume, and Thomas Paine made their assailments on the Christian faith, the means of spreading the blight of error were comparatively few. But now the accumulated arguments of German infidels for the last half-century may be thrown into a five-cent Sunday ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... if the imaginary traveller knew no alphabet of this earth at all, I think it would still be possible to suppose him seeing a difference between London and Paris, and, upon the whole, the real difference. He would not be able to read the words "Quai Voltaire;" but he would see the sneering statue and the hard, straight roads; without having heard of Voltaire he would understand that the city was Voltairean. He would not know that Fleet Street was named after the Fleet Prison. But the same national spirit which kept the Fleet Prison closed and narrow ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... well-known air, "Marlbrook s'en va a la guerre," when he crossed the Niemen to commence the Moscow campaign. But in England, the country which he has made illustrious, the nation he has saved, the land of his birth, he is comparatively forgotten; and were it not for the popular pages of Voltaire, and the shadow which a great name throws over the stream of time in spite of every neglect, he would be virtually unknown at this moment to nineteen-twentieths of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... particularly employed for popular amusement in the celebration of religious festivals. Only two actors are allowed to occupy the stage at the same time, and this is another point in common with the early Greek drama. The plots or stories of the Chinese plays are simple and effective, and Voltaire is known to have taken the plot of a Chinese drama, as Moliere took a comedy of Plautus, and applied it in writing a drama for the modern French stage. "The Sorrows of Han" belongs to the famous collection entitled "The Hundred ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... their muzzles at any cost whatever. A man of antique character; true as a child, simple, even bashful, and of a strength and valor rarely exampled among men. Open-hearted Antique populations would have much worshipped such an Appearance;—Voltaire, too, for the artificial Moderns, has made a myth of him, of another type; one of those impossible cast-iron gentlemen, heroically mad, such as they show in the Playhouses, pleasant but not profitable, to an undiscerning Pub1ic. [See Adlerfeld (Military History of Charles XII. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... that cry beyond reason and conviction, that cry of Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never shed blood?" In short he is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humour is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... very solemn face, his coat buttoned tight to his throat, and the party started. Colonel May, of Missouri, who read Voltaire and didn't believe in anything, maliciously took the ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... on entering her drawing-room, saw lying on the table three newspapers which made her draw back in horror, "Le Voltaire," "La ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... always played a leading part in the national life. It is so to-day; it was so in the eighteenth century. In England a Professor may easily become a fossil; in Germany he often guides the thought of the age. For some years that scoffing writer, Voltaire, had been openly petted at the court of Frederick the Great; his sceptical spirit was rapidly becoming fashionable; and now the professors at the Lutheran Universities, and many of the leading Lutheran preachers, were expounding ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... under certain natural impressions of religion, I read through Klopstock's works without weariness. I cared nothing about the word of God. I had about three hundred books of my own, but no Bible. I practically set a far higher value upon the writings of Horace and Cicero, Voltaire and Moliere, than upon the volume of inspiration. Now and then I felt that I ought to become a different person, and I tried to amend my conduct, particularly when I went to the Lord's supper, as I used to do twice every year, with the other young men. The day previous to attending that ordinance, ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... are in perfect sexual health, and who have not experienced religion before marriage, seldom give this emotion a single thought until late in life, when both libido and vita sexualis are on the wane or are extinct. Voltaire cynically, though truthfully, observes that when woman is no longer pleasing to man she then turns to God. A woman who has been disappointed in love almost invariably seeks consolation in religion. The virtuous unmarried woman, who has been unsuccessful in the pursuit ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... which was much applauded, succeeded those light and witty tales in which the Italian novelists furnished Voltaire and Marmontel with a model—each, in his or her turn, taking up the discourse, and with an equal dexterity avoiding every lugubrious image or mournful reflection that might remind those graceful idlers ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... little there is of it in reality, compared with the other objects of human attention. 'Let every man recollect, and he will be sensible how small a part of his time is employed in talking or thinking of Shakspeare, Voltaire, or any of the most celebrated men that have ever lived, or are now supposed to occupy the attention and admiration of the world. Let this be extracted and compressed; into what a narrow space will it go[759]!' I then slily introduced ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... people. I was in no danger of falling into the ridiculous mistakes of travellers, who, having but a partial view of things and persons, argue absurdly, and grossly misrepresent, while they intend to be accurate. Many people, as my French mandarin observed, reason like Voltaire's famous traveller, who happening to have a drunken landlord and a red-haired landlady at the first inn where he stopped in Alsace, wrote down among his memorandums—"All the men of Alsace drunkards: all the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the rocky capacity which characterises it, and to realise that more ardour and energy must be expected than from a smooth, round, flat head? How characteristic is the skull of Charles XII.! How different from the skull of his biographer Voltaire! Compare the skull of Judas with the skull of Christ, after Holbein, and I doubt whether anyone would fail to guess which is the skull of the wicked betrayer and which the skull of the innocent betrayed. And who is unacquainted with the statement in ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... circumstances were in any respect doubtful. I, on the contrary, had a strong propensity, to favourable construction, and particularly, where I found unequivocal marks of genius, strongly to incline to the supposition of generous and manly virtue. We ventilated in this way the characters of Voltaire and others, who have obtained from some individuals an ardent admiration, while the greater number have treated them with extreme moral severity. Mary was at last provoked to tell me, that praise, lavished in the way that I lavished it, could do no credit ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... brought about by the labors of men who fought against Christianity, at least ostensibly, under the banner of Deism or Natural Religion; the second Revolution was consummated under the auspices, not of a Deistic, but of an Atheistic philosophy. The school of Voltaire and Rousseau has given place to the school of Comte and Leroux. The difference between the two indicates a rapid and alarming advance. It may not be apparent at first sight, or on a superficial survey; but it will become evident to any one who compares the two ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... opposition became the organ of the age and of the country; but it was felt and recognized in Versailles only when it was too late. How easy it would have been then, as Marmontel had shown very clearly in his memoirs, to fetter Voltaire, who was offensive to the people, and how important this would have been for the state, will appear in the following paragraphs, in which we shall show that even the Parisian theatre, whose boards ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... comfort me, went away about two o'clock. My grandmother, seated opposite me in her large Voltaire armchair, questioned me: ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... beau-ideal: any upstart may become one. A villa in the North in which to spend the summer, a mansion in Madrid, and some property in Andalusia for the winter—there we shall live remembering our beloved Philippines. Of me Voltaire would not say, 'We have lived among these people only to enrich ourselves and to ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Voltaire was in favour of the jury system, principally because he had such a very low opinion of the magistrates of his day, whom he used to compare to Busiris. But, with his usual inconsequence, he takes no pains to conceal the fact that the populations of Abbeville ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... encompass this is to feed the mind on ideas, and ideas are not produced every day, nor for that matter every year, and luckily all ideas have not the same value. There are the ideas of Taine, of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Descartes, of Montaigne, of Ficino, of Petrarch, of Dante, of Cicero, of Aristotle, of Plato; and in a moment I have run the gamut of all the centuries of our Western civilization. Who will tell me which ideas we shall need most tomorrow? Evidently, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... So keen an observer can hardly have been blind to the signs of the times which were already close at hand. Free-thinker though he was, he was also a powerful member of the aristocracy, and little likely to demean himself—for so he would doubtless hold it—by playing the part of Voltaire or Rousseau. He would help those who could see to see still further, but he would not dazzle eyes that were yet imperfect with a light brighter than they could stand. He would therefore impose upon people, as much as he thought was for their good; ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... poetry. The truth, the simplicity, the nature, which ought to form it, are not to be found amongst any classes of the French people. The poetry of France, both ancient and modern, that of Ronsard and Marot, in earlier days; and that of Boileau, Racine, Corneille and Voltaire, in more modern times, bears the marks of having been formed in the court. If, for instance, in Scotland, the lower ranks, the labouring classes, like those of France, had transplanted the fictitious manners of the higher classes into the innocence of their cottage, or the sequestered solitude ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... blasphemy promoted the spread of infidel opinions. I do not now recollect that I heard Bard express any opinion as to a future state of existence. In that particular he was probably an agnostic. When in later years I saw a plaster cast of the head of Voltaire at the Cambridge Museum of Comparative Anatomy, I was impressed with the resemblance between Bard's ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... early development. He read voraciously, and apparently without restraint or control. The letters of Junius and of Horace Walpole were familiar to him "in boyhood," we are assured with provoking indefiniteness by Mrs Orr; as well as "all the works of Voltaire." Most to his mind, however, was the rich sinewy English and athletic fancy of the seventeenth-century Fantastic Quarles; a preference which foreshadowed his later delight in the great master of the Fantastic school, and of all who care ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 'Care sits behind a man and follows him wherever he goes.' So does ill-success; and henceforward the life of Cortes was almost invariably unsuccessful. There is an anecdote told of him (resting upon no higher authority than that of Voltaire) which, although evidently untrue, tells in a mythical way the reception which Cortes met at the Spanish Court; and his feelings as regards ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... When Voltaire, the courageous old philosopher, playwright, historian and novelist, and the great enemy of all religious and political tyranny, began to throw his bombs of criticism at everything connected with the Established ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... who called himself Voltaire, was the son of Francois Arouet of Poitou, who lived in Paris, had given up his office of notary two years before the birth of this his third son, and obtained some years afterwards a treasurer's office in the Chambre ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... unmanageable, the lawless, the violent. While Jean was dutifully learning his lessons to order, Feli, the obstreperous, imprisoned in the library, was feeding his tender mind with Diderot, Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, and similar diet, and at twelve exhibited such infidel tendencies as made it prudent to defer his first Communion for some ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... King of Prussia himself, free at last to do as he would. He sought out men of genius, musicians, poets, and thinkers. He offered Voltaire, the great Frenchman, a home with him, and his happiest hours were spent in his company, or listening to music, or playing the flute he had loved as a boy. But that was only one side of him, and the side which was ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... books, music composed by himself, etc. The various halls and rooms are kept nearly in the same manner, indeed, as when he used them. Adjoining his bedroom there is a small cabinet, where he used to dine alone or with Voltaire, without attendants, everything coming through the floor on a dumbwaiter, the king himself placing the dishes ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... to the men of the world—true affection is romantic—true religion is romantic; and if you were to ask me who of all powerful and popular writers in the cause of error had wrought most harm to their race, I should hesitate in reply whether to name Voltaire, or Byron, or the last most ingenious and most venomous of the degraded philosophers of Germany, or rather Cervantes, for he cast scorn upon the holiest principles of humanity—he, of all men, most helped forward the terrible change in the soldiers of Europe, from the ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin |
