I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheists... It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God.

I am beginning to feel that I am growing old; soon, I shall have to eat mush like children. I shall no longer be able to speak, which will be a rather great advantage for others and but a small inconvenience for myself.... The time in which I count in years is gone; that in which I count in days is here.... I had thought that the fibers of the heart would grow callous with age, it's not at all the case. I am not sure that my sensitivity hasn't increased; everything moves me, affects me.... To fade out between a man feeling your pulse and another bothering your head; not to know where one comes from, why one came, where one is going ...

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!

The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

This is a work that cannot be completed except by a society of men of letters and skilled workmen, each working separately on his own part, but all bound together solely by their zeal for the best interests of the human race and a feeling of mutual good will.

We do not know nature; causes hidden in her breast might have produced everything. In your turn, observe the polyp of Trembley: does it not contain in itself the causes which bring about regeneration? Why then would it be absurd to think that there are physical causes by reason of which everything has been made, and to which the whole chain of this vast universe is so necessarily bound and held that, nothing which happens, could have failed to happen,-causes, of which we are so invincibly ignorant that we have had recourse to a God, who, as some aver, is not so much as a logical entity? Thus to destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God-I mean, nature. It follows that the study of nature can make only unbelievers; and the way of thinking of all its more successful investigators proves this.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.

Scepticism is the first step towards truth. Variant: A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man's afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures ... But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered ... and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father.

Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.

We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man - it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land.

The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.

Distance is a great promoter of admiration!

Africans are always vicious... mostly inclined to lasciviousness, vengeance, theft and lies.

The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!

Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!

From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion. "Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot", as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker, and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004) by Louis K Dupré, p. 30 Variant translation: See this egg. It is with this that all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth are to be overturned.

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian.

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.

If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.

There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.