Philosophical Dictionary

Common sense is not so common.

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

The best is the enemy of good.

What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)

Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.

One always begins with the simple, then comes the complex, and by superior enlightenment one often reverts in the end to the simple. Such is the course of human intelligence.

So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of humanity. We are all fallible, let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

It is proved...that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.

What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions, and to reason correctly from them?

Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.

Sect and error are synonymous.

People have declaimed against luxury for two thousand years, in verse and prose, and people have always delighted in it.

The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.

Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote antiquity.

It is fancy rather than taste which produces so many new fashions.

if a philosopher wishes to be useful to human society, he must announce a God.

I leave there, and I say to my husband: "If you are without sin, shave me, imprison me, take my property; but if you have committed more sins than I have, it is for me to shave you, to have you imprisoned, and to seize your fortune. In justice these things should be equal.

In short, the alphabet was the origin of all man's knowledge, and of all his errors.

It is, it seems to me, to stop one's eyes and understanding to maintain that there is no design in nature; and if there is design, there is an intelligent cause, there exists a God. People

These two sentiments, "liberty and equality," do not necessarily lead to calumny, rapine, assassination, poisoning, and devastation of the lands of neighbors; but, the towering ambition and thirst for power of the great precipitate them head-long into every species of crime in all periods and all places.

The beauty which strikes the senses merely, the imagination, and that which is called "intelligence," is

As to fictions which represent nothing, teach nothing, and from which nothing results, are they anything more than falsities? And if they are incoherent and heaped together without choice, are they anything better than dreams?

beauty is often very relative, just as what is decent in Japan is indecent in Rome, and what is fashionable in Paris, is not fashionable in Pekin; and he saved himself the trouble of composing a long treatise on beauty.

He who would not wish his country to be bigger or smaller, richer or poorer, would be a citizen of the universe.

It needs twenty years to lead man from the plant state in which he is within his mother's womb, and the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of the reason begins to appear. It has needed thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.

I was in hopes," said Pangloss, "that I should reason with you a little about causes and effects, about the best of possible worlds, the origin of evil, the nature of the soul, and the pre-established harmony."At these words, the Dervish shut the door in their faces.