"The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death."

"He wanted to know how they prayed to God in El Dorado. "We do not pray to him at all," said the reverend sage. "We have nothing to ask of him. He has given us all we want, and we give him thanks continually."

"Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time."

"One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least."

"Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die."

"He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise."

"What's optimism? said Cacambo. Alas, said Candide, it is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell."

"Everything's fine today, that is our illusion."

"Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels."

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him."

"He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad."

"We never live, we are always in the expectation of living."

"The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third."

"The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us."

"But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand? [Written after an earthquake in Lisbon killed over 15,000 people]"

"Injustice in the end produces independence."

"The first step my son which one makes in the world is the one on which depends the rest of our days."

"It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere."

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking."

"Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well."

"The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error."

"To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd."

"People will continue to commit atrocities as long as they believe in absurdities."

"We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature."

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

"How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted."

"One great use of words is to hide our thoughts."

"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."

"There are truths that are not for all men nor for all times."

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."

"Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable."

"If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?"

"I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left."

"All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

"It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one."

"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."

"Love truth, but pardon error."

"Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable."

"The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it."

"In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since."

"Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes."

"A fondness for roving, for making a name for themselves in their onw country, and for boasting of what they had seen in their travels, was so strong in our two wanderers, that they resolved to be no longer happy; and demanded permission of the king to leave the country."

"My prayer to God is a very short one "Oh Lord make my enemies ridiculous!" God has granted it."

"Writing is the painting of the voice."

"Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe."

"The secret of being a bore... is to tell everything."

"The discovery of what is true and the practice of that which is good are the two most important aims of philosophy."

"I die adoring God loving my friends not hating my enemies and detesting superstition."

"History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes."