"Voltaire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leave the Countess, he returned to Italy, but the following year again visited her, remaining in Alsace when she proceeded to Paris. She happened to mention in a letter that she had been much pleased with seeing Voltaire's Brutus performed on the stage. This excited his emulation. "What!" he exclaimed, "Brutuses written by a Voltaire? I'll write Brutuses, and two at once, moreover, time will show whether such subjects for tragedy are better adapted for me ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... progress of mankind. The reader may perhaps be surprised to see with how much vigour and boldness the grave questions which underlie all polity, were handled so many years before the days of Russell and Sidney, of Montesquieu and Locke, Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau, and Voltaire; and he may be even more astonished to find exceedingly democratic doctrines propounded, if not believed in, by trained statesmen of the Elizabethan school. He will be also apt to wonder that a more fitting time ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... source relates to the Private Character. Friedrich's Biography or Private Character, the English, like the French, have gathered chiefly from a scandalous libel by Voltaire, which used to be called Vie Privee du Roi de Prusse (Private Life of the King of Prussia) [First printed, from a stolen copy, at Geneva, 1784; first proved to be Voltaire's (which some of his admirers had striven to doubt), Paris, 1788; stands avowed ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... as sadly infelicitous; and a large part of its infelicity is due to its having kept its French spelling and its French pronunciation. It is not in keeping; it diverts the flow of feeling; it is almost indecorous—much as a quotation from Voltaire in the original might be indecorous in a funeral address delivered by an Anglican ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... metaphysical, empirical, sceptical, idealist, and spiritualist historians. Absolutely historical historians do not and cannot exist. Can it be said that Thucydides and Polybius, Livy and Tacitus, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Giannone and Voltaire, were without moral and political views; and, in our time, Guizot or Thiers, Macaulay or Balbo, Ranke or Mommsen? And in the history of philosophy, from Hegel, who was the first to raise it to a great elevation, to Ritter, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... consulted him on a tragedy full of extraordinary incidents, Voltaire pointed out to him the defects of his piece. The writer replied, that he had purposely forsaken the beaten track of Corneille and Racine. "So much the worse," replied Voltaire, "originality is ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... God, for our conceptions of the workman-creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creatures. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says: 'God made man in His own image, but man has certainly paid Him ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... la Salle. La Salle was the name of an estate near Rouen, belonging to the Caveliers. The wealthy French burghers often distinguished the various members of their families by designations borrowed from landed estates. Thus, Francois Marie Arouet, son of an ex-notary, received the name of Voltaire, which he made famous.] His father Jean and his uncle Henri were wealthy merchants, living more like nobles than like burghers; and the boy received an education answering to the marked traits of intellect and character which he soon, began to display. He showed an inclination ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Paine; but that was no difficult matter. The most formidable Infidel is Lessing, the author of "Emilia Galotti";—I ought to have written, "was", for he is dead. His book is not yet translated, and is entitled, in German, "Fragments of an Anonymous Author". It unites the wit of Voltaire with the subtlety of Hume and the profound erudition of "our" Lardner. I had some thoughts of translating it with an Answer, but gave it up, lest men, whose tempers and hearts incline them to disbelief, should get hold of it; and, though the answers are satisfactory to my own mind, they may ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... unscientific, and, by reaction, credulous. The philosophes, Hume, Voltaire, and others, were exposing, like an ingenious American gentleman, "the mistakes of Moses." The Earl of Marischal told Hume that life had been chemically produced in a laboratory, so what becomes of Creation? ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... no nearer for the wind, the captain yielded to that instinct which urges man always to kill a curiosity, "to encourage the rest," as saith the witty Voltaire. "Get ready a gun—best shot in the ship lay ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... modern, Macklin, 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
... distilling it, so as to extract its most spirituous part, dates only from the year 1300. Arnand de Villeneuve was the inventor of it, and the produce of his Still appeared so marvellous, that it was named Aqua-Vitae, or Water of Life, and has ever since continued under that denomination in France; Voltaire and reason say that it might, with far more propriety, be called ...
— The Art of Making Whiskey • Anthony Boucherie
... begged him to accept, and as a minister, he ordered him, my father gave in, and the next day he went to install himself in the headquarters of the Paris division, situated, at that time in the Quai Voltaire, at the corner of the Rue de Saint-Pres, and which has since been demolished. My father took as his chief of staff his old friend Col. Mnard. I was delighted by all the military suite with which my father was surrounded. His headquarters were never empty of officers of all ranks. A squadron ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... from literary folks. It leads to nothing but the battle-dore and shuttle-cock intercourse of compliments, as light as cork and feathers. But Goethe is different, and a wonderful fellow, the Ariosto at once, and almost the Voltaire of Germany. Who could have told me thirty years ago I should correspond, and be on something like an equal footing, with the author of Goetz? Ay, and who could have told me fifty things else that have ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... adds, Not the Pantheon and all the temples consecrated to the inferior gods, nor even the temples consecrated to the twelve greater gods prevented "Deus Optimus Maximus," God most good, most great, from being acknowledged throughout the empire. Voltaire says, "In spite of all the follies of the people who venerated secondary and ridiculous gods, and in spite of the Epicurians, who in reality acknowledged none, it is verified that in all times the magistrates and wise adored one sovereign God." Secondary gods ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... the time of Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more poetical ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of Jean Cavalier between his coming to England and his death in 1740. Is anything interesting known about him? Whom did he marry? The happy French, smilingly following one another in a long procession headed by the loud and empty Napoleon Peyrat, say, Olympe Dunoyer, Voltaire's old flame. Vacquerie even thinks that they were rivals, and is very French and very literary and very silly in his comments. Now I may almost say it consists with my knowledge that all this has not a shadow to rest upon. It is very odd ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more immediately appropriated to the INSTITUTE OF FRANCE, may consist of 20,000 volumes,[106] and is contained in a long room—perhaps of one hundred feet—of which the further extremity is supposed to be adorned by a statue of VOLTAIRE. This statue is raised within a recess, and the light is thrown upon it from above from a concealed window. Of all deviations from good taste, this statue exhibits one of the most palpable. Voltaire, who was as thin as a hurdle, and a mere bag of bones, is ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... de Bourbonne, could sum up and estimate provincial ideas as correctly as Voltaire summarized the spirit of his times. He was thin and tall, and chose to exhibit in the matter of clothes the quiet indifference of a landowner whose territorial value is quoted in the department. His face, tanned by the Touraine ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... hatred for a writer qui misera qua non manu hodie vapulat. One of the ablest but most contentious of the Jesuits, Raynaud, pursued his memory with a story like that with which Tronchin improved the death of Voltaire: "Exitus impiissimi nebulonis metuendus est eius aemulatoribus, nam blasphemans evomuit ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... plays; and often of a refined and sentimental turn, which would be little relished in England. The tragedies acted at the Theatre Francais are generally modelled on the Greek; those of Racine and Voltaire are common. The comedies have seldom any low life or buffoonery, or vulgar ribaldry in them; The after pieces, and the ballets at the Academie de Musique, and at the Opera Comique, are often beautiful representations of rural innocence ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... received with rapture by the Orthodox, and Reynolds painted a fine picture of Beattie, standing with the "Essay" under his arm, while the angel of Truth beside him, drives away three demonic figures, in whose faces we trace a resemblance to the portraits of Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon. For this piece of flattery the painter was justly rebuked by Goldsmith, whose sympathies were certainly not on the side of infidelity. "It very ill becomeF a mann Of your eminence and character," said ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... "Nick Carter" she gave them those classics, "The Rollo Books"; and to the French-Canadians she gave, reasonably enough, the acknowledged masters of their language, Voltaire, Balzac, and Flaubert, till the horrified priest forbade from the pulpit any of his simple-minded flock to enter "that temple of sin, the public library." She had little classes in art-criticism for the young ladies in town, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... by Voltaire. There's a character in it called Doctor Pangloss, who thought that everything was for the best in this best of all ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... proudly distinguished as the century of Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and Goettingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but their ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... 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 of stupid bigots, have wellnigh smothered ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in which they have flourished, they are forgotten and neglected by every one in an incredibly short time. This somehow happens among us quite suddenly, like the shifting of the scenes on the stage. Oh, it's not at all the same as with Pushkin, Gogol, Moliere, Voltaire, all those great men who really had a new original word to say! It's true, too, that these talented gentlemen of the middling sort in the decline of their venerable years usually write themselves out in the most pitiful way, though they don't observe the ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... girl," said Tighe. There was no emotion in his face or voice save a dry humor, but Dalgetty knew what a flame must suddenly be leaping up inside him. "Read Voltaire's Micromegas." ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... end of the palace are the rooms once occupied by Voltaire. The walls are covered with painted wood carvings of cats, dogs, parrots, and peacocks, which Frederick caused to be placed there after his quarrel with Voltaire, to express his opinion of the Frenchman's ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... demoralisation, and the age of Louis XIV. was one of intellectual decay. After the death of Louis XIV. the French discovered England and English literature. Our island, regarded hitherto as barbarous, was visited by nearly every Frenchman of note for the two succeeding generations. Voltaire, in particular, assimilated and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... to read and write. In his seventh year he began the study of foreign languages; German, French,—which was as his mother tongue to him,—and mathematics, which he hated. At nine the passion of reading possessed him and he devoured his father's library, which included the French erotics, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists. His own first poetical work was indeed written in French. In 1811 he was sent to the school then just opened, at Tzarskoe Selo near Petersburg. Here, however, he learned little, the students being more interested in drinking bouts and platonic relations ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... stationary. It is not so with the more assiduously cultivated branches. What change, what advance, in every other department of culture! In geology, the ammonite of to-day was for Chalmers a parody facetiously made by Nature in imitation of her living conchology, and for Voltaire a pilgrim's cockle dropped in the passes of the Alps. In medicine, what progress has been made since ague was compared to the flutter of insects among the nerves, and good Mistress Dorothy Burton, who died but in 1629, cured it by hanging a spider round the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... one, both esoteric and exoteric, and those who are able can take the poetic view of dogma instead of the literal, if they prefer. Henry George and his wife took the spiritual or symbolic view, and moved steadily forward in the middle of the road. He was too gentle and considerate to quote Voltaire and Rousseau at inopportune times, and she sustained and encouraged his mental independence. All of which is here voiced with one foot on the soft pedal, and with no thought of putting forth an argument to the effect that young gentlemen with liberal views should marry ladies who belong ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... the residence of a numerous temporary and permanent foreign population. How our friend from quiet Nancy—which long ago had been deserted by royalty and its train, and where literary luminaries, such as Voltaire, Madame du Chatelet, Saint Lambert, &c., had ceased to make their fitful appearances—must have opened his eyes when this varied spectacle ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... at Biggar at the old sacramental times; I see and hear my grandfather, or Mr. Horne of Braehead, Mr. Leckie of Peebles, Mr. Harper of Lanark, as inveterate in argument as he was warm in heart, Mr. Comrie of Penicuik, with his keen, Voltaire-like face, and much of that unhappy and unique man's wit, and sense, and perfection of expression, without his darker and baser qualities. I can hear their hearty talk, can see them coming and going between the meetinghouse ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... soul's own windows, and surrounded by its walls. A portion of life which is ours exclusively, although we do occasionally lend its key to a few intimates; ours to cultivate just as we please, growing therein either pistachios and dwarf lemons for preserving, like Voltaire's immortal hero, or more spiritual flowers, "sweet basil and mignonette," such as the Lady of Epipsychidion sent to Shelley; kindly rosemary and balm; or, as may happen, a fine assortment of witch's herbs, infallible for turning us into cats ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... which was surely good enough for peasants and common fellows, as he called his people. He wrote directions to his different cooks with his own hand the better to pamper his appetite with every variety of the dishes and sauces he liked best. He stinted Voltaire in sugar while a guest in his palace, or gave it to him cheap and bad. He praised him face to face, and ridiculed him behind his back. Napoleon played blind-man's buff at St. Helena. He lost his ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... deepest interest, and is calculated to suggest profound reflections as to the capacities of the human mind. The two numbers devoted to the American Indians, as well as other volumes, present a good deal of new and curious matter. The life of JETAU, the Indian VOLTAIRE, is very striking. The Benefactors will be read with gratification by every one who loves to dwell upon the actions of those who have been great in doing good. The moral tendency of these works is excellent, and they may be read with pleasure as well as profit ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... thirst after knowledge and scientific acquirements gained their favour; our topics of conversation were inexhaustible, and I acquired more real information at Moscow than at Berlin, under the tuition of La Metri, Maupertuis, and Voltaire. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... formed a conspiracy to overthrow, by rhyme, all religion and government, and have already made great progress! It is not very scurrilous, but serious and ethereal. I never felt myself important, till I saw and heard of my being such a little Voltaire as to induce such a production. Murray would not publish it, for which he was a fool, and so I told him; but some one else will, doubtless. 'Something ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... had seen them on the 19th, standing to the northward. He proceeded off Cape St. Vincent, rather cruising for intelligence than knowing whither to betake himself; and here a case occurred that more than any other event in real history resembles those whimsical proofs of sagacity which Voltaire, in his Zadig, has borrowed from the Orientals. One of our frigates spoke an American, who, a little to the westward of the Azores, had fallen in with an armed vessel, appearing to be a dismasted privateer, deserted ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... Francois Arouet,—spoiled for a solid law-career, but whose OEDIPE we saw triumphing in the Theatres, and who will, under the new name of VOLTAIRE, become very memorable to us,—happened to be running towards Holland that way, one of his many journeys thitherward; and actually saw this Congress, then in the first year of its existence. Saw it, probably dined with it. A Letter of his still extant, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... comprised images of saints, elephants, giraffes, cherubs with little wings tinted in pink and yellow, a tall Madonna and Child, a bust of George Washington, a Napoleon, a grinning Voltaire, an angel with a pink trumpet and an evil-looking ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... anxiety. Mrs. Gibson was sitting at her embroidery in the drawing-room, and the two girls were at the window, Cynthia laughing at Molly's earnest endeavours to imitate the French accent in which the former had been reading a page of Voltaire. For the duty, or the farce, of settling to 'improving reading' in the mornings was still kept up, although Lord Hollingford, the unconscious suggestor of the idea, had gone back to town without making any of the efforts to see Molly again that Mrs. Gibson had anticipated on the night ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of the body. Indeed the entire working of the human mechanism, physical and psychical, may be aided by the beautiful art of music. With some people the digestion is facilitated by hearing music. Voltaire said that this fact accounted for the popularity ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... The history of these petty feuds is not healthy intellectual food, it is at best amusing scandal. But these quarrels of authors do not degrade the authors in our eyes, they only show them to be, what we knew, as vain, irritable, and opinionative as other men. Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Voltaire, Rousseau, belabour their enemies, and we see nothing incongruous in their doing so. It is not so when the awful majesty of Milton descends from the empyrean throne of contemplation to use the language of the gutter or the fish-market. The bathos is unthinkable. The universal ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... She knew full well that vain pride baulked his employment; and after many a struggle she prevailed upon him to become a letter-writer. "An undergraduate, who has read Herbert Spencer, Comte and Voltaire," said he, "cannot demean himself to letter-writing for the public," to which she justly replied that an education which prevents a man earning his daily bread ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... upon him. Though it 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 and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the flower?—In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakespeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Revocation of the Edict of Nantes he retired to Rotterdam, where he devoted his life to literary researches. He died at the Hague in 1723. For his great reputation as a skilful diplomatist, see Voltaire's 'Age of ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... 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, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... teeming with memories of the Theatres Beaumarchais, Voltaire, Moliere, Feuillet, Sardou, Sandeau, &c., which I had heard read so continually at the Dower-House amongst the Fens, the views of dramatic literature held at the Coronet appeared of the most extraordinary character. They certainly ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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
... However, we had excellent beds. In my room there was a small collection of books, on a dusty shelf, which I should not have expected to find in such hands. Among them were some old works of theological casuistry, Metastasio, a translation of Voltaire's plays, and a geographical dictionary in Italian. I learnt that they had belonged to the proprietor's uncle, a medico at Padua, and were heirlooms with his property, which our host inherited. The position ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Voltaire pronounced him "le savant le plus universel de l'Europe," but characterized his metaphysical labors with the somewhat equivocal compliment of "metaphysicien assez delie pour vouloir reconcilier la theologie ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... who, whenever he wished to flatter me, used to say, "Vous savez, Monsieur, je vous regarde presque comme Francais." Voltaire was not ashamed at Berlin, when the Prussian soldiers did not enact the Roman legions to his mind, to exclaim in the midst of German princesses, "F——j'ai demande des hommes, et on me donne des Allemands!" Marechal Schomberg, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think. He preferred the comedy view. 'I have never yet seen or heard,' he says, 'anything serious that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopaedists, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, are all to me but impostors in their various ways. Fame or interest is their object, and after all their parade, I think a ploughman who sows, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... stake because she refused to bow her head before two 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 ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... king, who was such an autocrat, and yet despised slaves! who wielded the sword as skilfully as the pen! to whom the booming of the cannon sounded as melodious as the notes of his flute—who made verses with Voltaire, and won battles with Schwerin and Ziethen! He was able to do every thing, and we have ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... of the character and conduct of Alexius, Maimbourg has favored the Catholic Franks, and Voltaire has been partial to the schismatic Greeks. The prejudice of a philosopher is less excusable ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... holdings were gained through musty papers from rulers of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, a nation Voltaire declared "neither ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Bacchus, that next day he was seized with a fit of the apoplexy, which has a little impaired his memory; but he retains all the oddity of his character in perfection, and is going back to Italy by the way of Geneva, that he may have a conference with his friend Voltaire, about giving the last blow to the Christian superstition — He intends to take shipping here for Holland or Hamburgh; for it is a matter of great indifference to him at what part of the continent ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... May 1760, first studied to be a painter, but soon took to the stage. His first formal appearance was at the Haymarket in 1778 as Dick in The Apprentice. The same year at Drury Lane he played in James Miller's version of Voltaire's Mahomet the part of Zaphna, which he had studied under Garrick. The Palmira of the cast was Mrs Robinson ("Perdita"). Bannister was the best low comedian of his day. As manager of Drury Lane (1802) he was no less successful. He retired in 1815 and died on the 7th of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... her Majesty, the Empress Josephine, relate one day that she had much difficulty in repressing a smile when, among a number of German princesses presented to her, one was announced under the name of Cunegonde [Cunegonde was the mistress of Candide in Voltaire's novel of Candide.] Her Majesty added that, when she saw the princess take her seat, she imagined she saw her lean to one side. Assuredly the Empress had read the adventures of Candide and the daughter of the very noble ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Jean Calas, accused as a Protestant of having hanged his son, who had gone over to the Church of Rome; the ruin of the family; the claustration of the daughters; the flight of the widow to Switzerland; her introduction to Voltaire; the excited zeal of that incomparable partisan, and the passionate persistence with which, from year to year, he pursued a reversal of judgment, till at last he obtained it, and devoted the tribunal ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... to read Voltaire's 'Rome Sauvee', which, by the very faults that your SEVERE critics find with it, I am sure I shall like; for I will at an any time give up a good deal of regularity for a great deal of brillant; and for the brillant surely nobody is equal to Voltaire. Catiline's ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... had four mammae, two of which were near the axillae, about four inches in circumference, with proportionate sized nipples. She became a mother at fourteen, and gave milk from all her breasts. In his "Dictionnaire Philosophique" Voltaire gives the history of a woman with four well-formed and symmetrically arranged breasts; she also exhibited an excrescence, covered with a nap-like hair, looking like a cow-tail. Percy thought the excrescence a prolongation of the coccyx, and said that similar instances were ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, &c., were read by the old federalists, but now they seem known more as naughty words, than as great names. I am much mistaken if a hundred untravelled Americans could be found, who have read Boileau or Le Fontaine. ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... 'philosophers,' both in the original French, and in those English translations of which so plentiful a crop made its appearance during the fifty years before and after 1800. There, for instance, lay the seventy volumes of Voltaire. Close by was an imperfect copy of the Encyclopaedia, which Mr. Stephens was getting cheap; on the other side a motley gathering of Diderot and Rousseau; while Holbach's 'System of Nature,' and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... should delight in painting the other picture if there were any truth in it: I should have joyed in showing how the English aristocracy for this once threw off their senseless pride and hailed the greatest of men at least as an equal. Frederic the Great would have done this, for he put Voltaire at his own table, and told his astonished chamberlains that "privileged spirits rank with sovereigns." Such wisdom was altogether above the English aristocracy of that or any time. Yet they might have risen above the common in this one instance. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... above the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware, laid out a city as square and level as a checker-board, and named it Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. Before taking possession of the land, he concluded a treaty with the Delaware Indians, to whom it belonged, "the only treaty," as Voltaire says, "between savages and Christians that was never sworn to and never broken." Penn's stately and distinguished bearing, his affability and kindness of heart, made a deep impression upon the Indians; they always remembered him with trust and affection; ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... books to be digested. I laid hands on every heretical work I could hear of. By chance I made the acquaintance of a young man who, together with his family, were Unitarians. I got, and devoured, Channing's works. I found a splendid copy of Voltaire in the Holkham library, and hunted through the endless volumes, till I came to the 'Dialogues Philosophiques.' The world is too busy, fortunately, to disturb its peace with such profane satire, such withering sarcasm as flashes through an 'entretien' like that between 'Frere Rigolet' ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... preached for the first time in the church of St. Eustache in Paris his famous sermon on Matthew vii. 14, and had arrived at the peroration, the entire congregation rose from their seats, transported and dismayed. This prosopopoeia, which still astonishes in the perusal, has been chosen by Voltaire in the article "Eloquence" in the Encyclopdie as an example presenting "la figure la plus hardie, et l'un des plus beaux traits d'loquence qu'on puisse lire chez les anciens et les modernes." His father, who spelt his name Masseilhon, was a notary. The business ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... henceforward sixteen millions. This is all very well, but surely it would be better to put off questions affecting education until the siege is over. The alteration in the nomenclature of the streets also continues. The Boulevard Prince Eugene is to be called the Boulevard Voltaire, and the statue of the Prince has been taken down, to be replaced by the statue of the philosopher; the Rue Cardinal Fesch is to be called the Rue de Chateaudun. The newspapers also demand that the Rue de Londres should be rebaptised on the ground that ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... of the fourth century. The building has been altered a number of times. In 1793 it was converted into a temple of reason. The statue of the Virgin Mary was replaced by one of Liberty. Busts of Robespierre, Voltaire, and Rosseau were erected. This church was closed to worship 1794, but was reopened by Napoleon 1802. It was desecrated by the Communards 1811, when the building was used as a military depot. The large nave, 417 feet long, 156 feet wide, and ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... 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 ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Education.—As to the efficiency of the instruction in the Jesuit schools, opinions widely differ. Bacon and Descartes indorse it in highest terms, while Leibnitz, Voltaire, and others are equally strong in its condemnation. Bacon remarks, "As to whatever relates to the instruction of the young, we must consult the schools of the Jesuits, for there can be nothing that is better done." Leibnitz, on the ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... 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 man's social relations, his duty to his neighbor, are taken ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... been written about the sacred prostitutions in paganism, and it is well known that Voltaire ridiculed the scholars who were credulous enough to believe in the tales of Herodotus. But this practice has been proven by {247} irrefutable testimony. Strabo, for instance, whose great-uncle was arch-priest ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... patriarchs, Philo nevertheless upheld in its integrity the Mosaic law, and found in every one of the six hundred and thirteen precepts a spiritual meaning. Even the details of the tabernacle offerings have their universal lesson when he expounds them as symbols. Voltaire speaks cynically of Judaism as a religion of sacrifices: Philo shows that the ritual of sacrifice suggests moral lessons. The command of the red heifer, a part of the law which was particularly subject to attack, emphasizes the law of moral as well as of physical ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... of the wide spread of infidelity among us, it is consolatory that a sect is sprung up in the heart of the metropolis, and is daily on the increase, of teachers of that healing doctrine which Pope upheld, and against which Voltaire directed his envenomed wit. We mean those practical preachers of Optimism, or the belief that Whatever is best, the cads of omnibuses, who, from their little back pulpits, not once in three or four hours, as those proclaimers of 'God and His prophet' in Mussulman countries, but every minute, at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... very gradually that Shakespeare's pre-eminence was realised by French critics. It is to Voltaire that Frenchmen owe a full knowledge of Shakespeare. Voltaire's method of teaching Shakespeare to his countrymen was characteristically cynical. He studied him closely when he visited England as a young man. At ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... old. It was touched upon in this work in connection with the social conditions of the Greeks and Romans, and at the close of the Middle Ages. Plato and Aristotle, the Romans, the small bourgeois of the Middle Ages were all swayed by it, and it even swayed Voltaire, who, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, published a treatise on the subject. The fear ever turns up again—this circumstance must be emphasized—at periods when the existing social conditions are disintegrating and breaking down. Seeing ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Meroul, on entering her drawing-room, saw lying on the table three newspapers which made her draw back in horror, "Le Voltaire," "La Rpublique Franaise," and ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... never seen Ferney. Walter discovered, in looking over the local guidebook, that this is the day for Ferney, and that it is open until six o'clock. He found that we had an hour after reaching the boat landing. Walter secured an automobile and we set forth for the home of Voltaire, which is ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... Bagration, it would have been necessary to invent him," said the wit Shinshin, parodying the words of Voltaire. Kutuzov no one spoke of, except some who abused him in whispers, calling him a court weathercock and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... whole man false. It leaves nothing sincere or trustworthy about him. His best qualities are poisoned and perverted by it, and operate exactly as the worst. When your lords had many writers as immoral as the object of their statue (such as Voltaire and others) they chose Rousseau, because in him that peculiar vice, which they wished to erect into ruling virtue, was by far the most conspicuous. We have had the great professor and founder of THE PHILOSOPHY OF VANITY in England. As I had good opportunities ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... intelligible—but only up to a certain point. If words are heaped up beyond it, the thought becomes more and more obscure again. To find where the point lies is the problem of style, and the business of the critical faculty; for a word too much always defeats its purpose. This is what Voltaire means when he says that the adjective is the enemy of the substantive. But, as we have seen, many people try to conceal their poverty of thought under ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... we, reading these pleasant felicitations, are wont to thank God with greater fervour than the occasion demands that we are more merry and wise than our neighbours. Mr. Brander Matthews, for example, has told us that there are newspaper writers in New York who have cultivated a wit, "not unlike Voltaire's." He mistrusts this wit because he finds it "corroding and disintegrating"; but he makes the comparison with that casual assurance which is ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... had taken down, a Volume of Voltaire—curious fascination that Frenchman had, for all his destructive irony!—a volume of Burton's travels, and Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights," he had pitched upon the last. He felt, that evening, the want of something sedative, a desire to rest from thought ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tell me, of the rapacity, immorality, or injustice, of some one of these Parson Justices; one and all exclaiming against the tythe system, which does more to uphold infidelity than ever did all the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Mirabaud, Paine, and all the theological writers that ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... and of somewhat brownish complexion, with an agreeable and engaging voice. He never complained, nor gave any hint as to who he was, and throughout his whole prison life no one gained the least clue to his identity. The only instance in which he attempted to make himself known is described by Voltaire, who tells us that while at Sainte Marguerite he threw out from the grated window of his cell a piece of fine linen, and a silver plate on which he had traced some strange characters. This, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... at Pregny on the northern shore of the lake, in close neighborhood to Ferney, the retreat of Voltaire. Susanne Vaudenet Gallatin, his grandmother, was a woman of the world, a lady of strong character, and the period was one when the influence of women was paramount in the affairs of men; among her friends she counted Voltaire, with ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... universities have 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 certain radical views, not only ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... ninety-six in a hundred doing such 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. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mind in the Church of England, no greater mind, I am disposed to think, in the English nation. His intellect has the range of an Acton, his forthrightness is the match of Dr. Johnson's, and his wit, less biting though little less courageous than Voltaire's, has the illuminating quality, if not the divine playfulness, of the wit ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... never have been a romantic, though the macabre romanticism of 1830 may be found in his designs. A realist, brutal, bitter, he was in his youth; he saw the grosser facts of life, so often lamentable and tender, in the spirit of a Voltaire doubled by a Rabelais. There is honest and also shocking laughter in these early illustrations. A fantaisiste, graceful, delicate—and indelicate—emerged after the lad went up to Paris, as if he had stepped out ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... though his ideas on the subject were rather those of the eighteenth century than our own. It is interesting to find an English officer reading Voltaire, Gessner, Ariosto, and quoting them from memory (which explains that some of his quotations had to be corrected). The sentimental vein of Rousseau's generation still flows and vibrates in him, as when he says that ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... 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
... drawing upon himself the least mark of distaste, or, even dissatisfaction. The greatest part of the last twenty years of his life were spent in ease and retirement, and he gave himself no trouble about reputation. When the celebrated Voltaire was in England, he waited upon Congreve, and pass'd some compliments upon him, as to the reputation and merit of his works; Congreve thanked him, but at the same time told that ingenious foreigner, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 buildings on millions of other plans, ought to rank ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... knowledge has been performed by men of sobriety, many of them having been drinkers of water only. Under this last category may be ranked Demosthenes, Johnson, Haller, Bacon, Milton, Dante, etc. Johnson, it is true, was a great tea drinker. Voltaire drank coffee at times to excess, and occasionally a small quantity of light wine. So, also, did Fontenelle. Newton solaced himself with the fumes of tobacco. Of Locke, whose long life was devoted to constant intellectual ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson |
