"Voltaire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... 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 sun, was less intellectual than shrewd. Accustomed ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... 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; but, on the other hand, he would ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... they had never seen before: but especially when he observed all the members of the National Assembly extend themselves along the shore, as a piece of French politeness, to honour this expedition, with Rousseau, Voltaire, and Beelzebub at their head; he set spurs to Sphinx, and at the same time cut and cracked away as hard as he could, holding in the reins with all his might, striving to make the creature plunge and show some uncommon diversion. But sulky and ill-tempered ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... 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. For Shakespeare had not only supreme genius ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... be until national and individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist. The man of thirty-nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is not going to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing with the other in the temple which bears on its front, "Deo erexit Voltaire." A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the illustration was neatly handled. Yes, and there is no such thing as a broad garden. It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is narrow. You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together in it, except by the forcing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in thought are 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
... should be great and glorious, that she should not cease to be democratic, and to advance toward a democracy more and more equitable and favorable to all,—such were the aspirations and the programme of Beranger. He goes so far as to say that in his childhood he had an aversion, almost a hatred, for Voltaire, on account of the insult to patriotism in his famous poem of La Pucelle; and that afterwards, even while acknowledging all his admirable qualities and the services he rendered to the cause of humanity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... however, lies only on the surface. The language of true poetry is understood by all; it strikes home: however rude the thoughts, however uncultivated the understanding, the heart can feel; and it is to the heart the poet speaks; and even in the rudest ages of mankind his power was acknowledged. Voltaire has remarked, that "amusement is one of the wants ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... numerous correspondents be kind enough to inform me what is the true signification and derivation of the word "caconac?" D'Alembert, writing to Voltaire concerning Turgot, says: ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... When Voltaire visited this country in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, he was so impressed with our barbarity, especially in the cutting off the tails of our horses, that he could not refrain from giving vent to one of his pungent ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... the army of Christ which have always been the bulwark and ornament of the Christian republic as well as of civil society." But then he was the Pope of Rome, the Arch-prelate of the Church. "Monk," fiercely demands Voltaire, "Monk, what is that profession of thine? It is that of having none, of engaging one's self by an inviolable oath to be a fool and a slave, and to live at the expense of others." But he was the philosophical skeptic of Paris. "Where is the town," cries Montalembert, "which has ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... 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
... first instance, to medicine, a profession which demands both talent and a cheerful nature, but the latter qualification even more than talent. Backed by Dupont de Nemours, connected by a lucky chance with the Abbe Morellet (whom Voltaire nicknamed Mords-les), and protected by the Encyclopedists, Doctor Minoret attached himself as liegeman to the famous Doctor Bordeu, the friend of Diderot, D'Alembert, Helvetius, the Baron d'Holbach and Grimm, in whose presence he felt himself a mere boy. These men, influenced by Bordeu's ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... Aristophanes; Rome her Juvenal; Spain has had her Cervantes; France her Rabelais, her Moliere, her Voltaire; Germany her Jean Paul, her Heine; England her Swift, her Thackeray; and America has her Lowell. By the side of all those great masters of satire, though kept somewhat in the rear by provincialism of ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... poverty. Of the two plays he wrote, Saintsbury says, "The wit is indisputable, but his chansons contain as much wit as the Figaro plays." He made a fortune by speculations in the American war, and lost by others, one of them being the preparation of a sumptuous edition of Voltaire. For the culmination and decline, as well as appreciation, of him, see the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... many an emendation show'd the age Look'd far beyond the rubric title-page. Our nicer palates lighter labours seek, Cloy'd with a folio-NUMBER once a week; Bibles, with cuts and comments, thus go down: E'en light Voltaire is NUMBER'D through the town: Thus physic flies abroad, and thus the law, From men of study, and from men of straw; Abstracts, abridgments, please the fickle times, Pamphlets and plays, and politics ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... Voltaire says 'No:' he tells you that Candide Found life most tolerable after meals; He 's wrong—unless man were a pig, indeed, Repletion rather adds to what he feels, Unless he 's drunk, and then no doubt he 's freed From his own brain's ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... heroine's beauty when it is obvious that she has none. It may be suggested that is this hard upon the plain women who possess the mysterious gift of charm. The answer is that no charming woman is ever plain, even if someone—Voltaire, perhaps—spoke of ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... thoroughly broken loose not only from Christianity but from natural religion and in some cases placed themselves in violent antagonism to both, are still unable to divest themselves of the religious sentiment or to appease its craving for satisfaction. There being no God, they find it necessary, as Voltaire predicted it would be, to invent one, not for the purposes of police (they are far above such sordid Jesuitism), but as the solution of the otherwise hopeless enigma of our spiritual nature. Science takes cognizance of all phenomena, and this apparently ineradicable tendency of the human ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... head, as though sweating in an oven had three times over stained his skin. Closely-set wrinkles that could no longer be relaxed made eternal furrows, whiter in their cracks. The yellow face was all wrinkles. The bald skull, resembling Voltaire's, was as parched as a death's-head, and but for a few hairs at the back it would have seemed doubtful whether it was that of a living man. Under a rigid brow, a pair of Chinese eyes, like those of an image under a glass shade in a tea-shop—artificial ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... ended as a pessimistic mystic. Felicien Rops could 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 of the eighteenth century. Rops summed up in his book plates, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the Great Elector. Her next long step to greatness was taken by Frederick II, again by favor of successful warfare, though doubtless also by means of a highly organized, and for those days very efficient, administration. Voltaire said of Frederick's Prussia that its trade was war. Another war added to her territory in 1814-15. Three successful wars—those of 1864, 1866, and 1870-71—made her the nucleus of a united German nation and the leading military power of the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... in the catalogue. Voltaire! He has more than two heads. The Godless One, who spent his whole life defending God. The Mocker, who was mocked, because 'he believed in God like a child.' The author of the ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... exile in England, to open the long campaign, of which he was from that time forth to the close of his days the brilliant and indomitable captain. He died in 1778, bright, resolute, humane, energetic, to the last. Thus Turgot's life was almost exactly contemporary with the pregnant era of Voltaire's activity. In the same spring in which Turgot died, Maurepas too came to his end, and Necker was dismissed. The last event was the signal at which the floods of the deluge fairly began to rise, and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... Brahman, 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 de Pilpay, de Lokman,[FN239] d'Esope, bien raisonables. But methinks the sage ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... not merely a grisette, as her enemies attempted to say, and as Voltaire repeated in one of his malicious days. She was the prettiest woman in Paris, spirituelle, elegant, adorned with a thousand gifts and a thousand talents, but with a sort of sentiment which had not the grandeur ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... 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
... 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 could not be found for such philosophical debate than ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... except for Sir Charles' distinct assurance as to "all four," I should have thought my "outrecuidance" was probably a counterblast to Wollaston's conservatism. With regard to Hooker, he was already, like Voltaire's Habbakuk, "capable du tout" in ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... as both blasphemous and treasonable. To quote once more from Prince Metternich: "He had a profound contempt for the false philosophy as well as for the false philanthropy of the eighteenth century. Of all the founders of the doctrine it was Voltaire who was his pet aversion, and he carried his hate so far as to attack on every ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... account of how a French translation of a play of Vanbrugh—not architect of Blenheim only, but accomplished in many other ways—appeared at the Odeon, in 1862, with all fitting raptures, as a posthumous work of Voltaire recently discovered. The Voltairean wit vas found as "delightful in this as ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. Never, probably, was so impudent ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... awnly son not three hours under the mould! Brought up in France as a youngster he was, and this I s'pose is what comes of reading Voltaire. My lord for manners, and no more heart than a wormed nut—that's Sir Harry, and ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... book 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
... from the other; it was not doubtful which was which. The history of their respective victories and defeats could consequently be written. So in the eighteenth century it was easy to perceive how many people Voltaire and Rousseau might be alienating from Bossuet and Fenelon. But how shall we satisfy ourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own? Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself Christianity? A bishop may ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the Voltaire of Greece, who brought to the attention of his countrymen the discovery that man created the gods in his own image. He attacked the conceptions of the Greek deities with these words, "Mortals deem that the gods ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... acceptance that a great deal of scientific literature must be read between the lines. It's not everyone who has the lamentableness of a Sir John Evans. Just as a great deal of Voltaire's meaning was inter-linear, we suspect that a Captain Duff merely hints rather than to risk having a Prof. Lawrence Smith fly at him and call him "a half-insane man." Whatever Captain Duff's meaning may have been, and whether he smiled like a Voltaire ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... promoting its various objects. Connected with the duties of his office, was the more personal duty of improving his own faculties, and extending his knowledge of the art which he had engaged to cultivate. He read much, and studied more. The perusal of Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, and the other French classics, could not be without advantage to one whose exuberance of power, and defect of taste, were the only faults he had ever been reproached with; and the sounder ideas thus acquired, he was constantly busy in exemplifying by attempts of his own. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... it! For this reason. I wished so much to make your acquaintance. I mean—to know you a little. You go perhaps in the afternoon? Could you not do me the great pleasure of coming to lunch with me? I inhabit the Quai Voltaire. It is all that ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... Jean Jacques, with a look of relief, his face lighting. "That's a big man with a most capable and far-reaching mind. He takes a thing in as the ocean mouths a river. If I had had men like that to deal with all my life, what a different ledger I'd be balancing now! Descartes, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel—he has an ear for them all. That is the intellectual side of him; and in business"—he threw up a hand—"there he views the landscape from the mountain-top. He has vision, strategy, executive. He is Napoleon and Anacreon in one. He is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... political favorites of the hour. Decrees have already turned the Avenue de l'Empereur into the Avenue des Lacs; the Avenue Napoleon into the Avenue de l'Opera; the Place Napoleon into the Place de l'Opera; the Avenue de l'Imperatrice into the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne; the Boulevard Voltaire into the Boulevard de Belfort; the Rue Magnan into the Rue d'Angouleme-Saint-Honore (its old name); the Rue Billault into the Rue de l'Oratoire-du-Roule, also its old appellation; while there has been a general effacing of those names which the Communists set up upon the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... guiding human actions, as a general moves an army; by men of the world, to chance, or the mastering influence of individual energy and talent. Bossuet may be considered as the most eminent of the former class. Voltaire brought the doctrines of the latter to their highest perfection. In opposition to both, Montesquieu strenuously asserted the operation of general laws, emanating doubtless originally from the institutions of the Deity, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... officious than the Jehus of Greenwich, or the wights of Charing Cross or Piccadilly. I resisted all their importunities, and passed on through the Champs Elysees, or a dusty road through a grove, intersected with ill-formed paths, with a few gaudy cafes bearing pompous inscriptions—for Voltaire has made the French too fond of nomenclature to say with our Shakspeare, "what's in a name?" The road presented a strange specimen of the insubordination of French driving, notwithstanding police superintendants affected much concern in the matter. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... 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 ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... middle of December I started for Paris, where I alighted at the dingy-looking Hotel Voltaire, situated on the quay of the same name, and took a very modest room with a pleasant outlook. Here I wished to remain unrecognised (preparing myself meanwhile for my work) until I could present myself to Princess Metternich at the beginning ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... be given a special performance of 'Irene,' the new work of M. de Voltaire, to be followed by 'Rose and Colas,' an operetta by M. Sedaine and M. de Monsigny, for the benefit of Mademoiselle Colombe, of the Comedie Italienne, who will appear in the second piece. Her Majesty the Queen has ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... lyric tragedy in two acts, words by Gaetano Rossi, the subject taken from Voltaire's "Semiramis," was first produced at the Fenice, Venice, Feb. 3, ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... contained too much monkish superstition for their taste, it was because they had learned their ecclesiastical history from the Baillets and the Tillemonts, who were pious indeed, but very critical of legends. Voltaire, writing of Jeanne, jeered at the rascally monks and their dupes. But if we quote the lines of La Pucelle, why not also the article[119] in the Dictionnaire Philosophique, which contains three pages of profounder truth and nobler thought than certain voluminous ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... half inclined to think that crallis is a Slavish word. I saw something like it in a lil called 'Voltaire's Life of Charles.' How you should have come by such names and words is ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... as the actual person of Maupertuis could have presented. When it is recollected that Maupertuis died at a distance from Berlin, once the scene of his triumphs—overwhelmed by the petulant ridicule of Voltaire, and out of favour with Frederick, with whom to be ridiculous was to be worthless—we can hardly wonder at the imagination even of a man of physical science calling up his Eidolon in the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... bigotry employed the pen of Voltaire in deprecation of the horrors of superstition; and though an infidel himself, his essay on toleration does honour to his pen, and has been a blessed means of abating the rigour of persecution in most European states. Gospel purity will equally ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... nothing human worthy of reverence, but Intellect. Invited to dinner, on the same day, with the Emperor of Russia, and with Voltaire, and with meek St. John, he would certainly have told the coachman to put him ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... loveliness? How has the belief of a Saint been united in this high and true mind with the clearness of a Sceptic; the devout spirit of a Fenelon made to blend in soft harmony with the gaiety, the sarcasm, the shrewdness of a Voltaire? ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... government, suffered 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
... 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 ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... should they be spared? Who will be instructed by the lessons which are taught after death? Must heaven be a desert in order that man may be punished for having lived? Is it not enough to have lived? I do not know who asked that question, unless it was Voltaire on his death-bed; it is a cry of despair worthy of a helpless old atheist. But to what purpose? Why so many struggles? Who is there above us who delights in so much agony? Who amuses himself and whiles away an idle hour watching this spectacle of creation, always renewed and always dying, seeing ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... belief the birth of the mind is complete. But the mind is only a part of man. The heart must be born again. What is the normal state of the unregenerate heart? It is one of either indifference or hatred. The latter is the former fully ripened. It is said that Voltaire carried a seal ring upon which were engraved the words, "Crush the wretch," and every time he sealed a letter he impressed his spirit of hatred upon that letter. Now, the gospel sets forth the love of God in Christ and the loveliness of Christ's sacrifice for us in such a manner ...
— The Spirit and the Word - A Treatise on the Holy Spirit in the Light of a Rational - Interpretation of the Word of Truth • Zachary Taylor Sweeney
... Miscellaneous observations. Chess-men. Tree of Liberty. Crucifixes. Virgins. Saints. Bishops, Old Women 8 Wall round Paris. New Bridge. Field of the Federation. Bastille 15 Coins and Tokens 19 Theatres 24 Pantheon. Jacobins. Quai Voltaire. Rue Rousseau. Cockades 27 Execution of two criminals with a beheading machine 32 Versailles. Botany, Sounding meridians 38 Dogs and Cats. Two-headed Boy 50 Miscellanies. Books burnt. Chess, Convents 54 ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... Fra-Paolo, the most terrible adviser that the Ten at Venice ever had; more deceitful than a king; more adroit than Louis XI; more profound than Machiavelli; as sophistical as Hobbes; as acute as Voltaire; as pliant as the fiancee of Mamolin; and distrustful of no one in the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... occupying such leisure as was allowed by their professional pursuits. They were indeed men of liberal sympathies, intelligent and independent enough to hold by a party which was out of power. They had read Hume and Voltaire and Rousseau; they had sat at the feet of Dugald Stewart; and were in sympathy with intellectual liberalism. But they were men who meant to become judges, members of parliament, or even bishops. Nothing ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Voltaire and Rousseau and Ben Franklin here, You've seen hobnobbing with the highly-born; Seen Genius smile, while, with a hint of fear, It gave to Birth not homage ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... the Declaration of Independence again, nor behind the writings of Voltaire again. We let Catholicism run around loose now, but that is because Voltaire cut its claws and pulled out ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... who was brought hither by King Robert, planted another, which existed in the time of Sannazaro, but was destroyed by relic-collectors in the last century. A branch was sent to Frederick the Great by the Margravine of Baireuth, with some verses by Voltaire. If from no other cause, the tomb would be interesting from its visitors; here Boccaccio renounced the career of a merchant for that of a poet, and a well-known legend, that St. Paul visited the sepulcher of Virgil at Naples, was ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... been highly illiberal to suppose, that a body of men, remarkable, as the early Jesuit missionaries were thought to be, for probity, talent, and disinterestedness, should studiously sit down to compose fabrications for the mere purpose of deceiving the world. Even Voltaire, who had little partiality for the sacerdotal character, is willing to admit, that their relations ought to be considered as the productions of the most intelligent travellers that have extended and embellished the fields of Science and Philosophy. This ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... believers who despised and hated the best free research men, and who knew himself in a position to confute them. He possessed some elements of culture, and had early had thoroughly drilled into him what, in comparison with the views of later times on History and Religion, was narrow and antiquated in Voltaire's education, and for this reason regarded, not only Voltaire's attack on the Church, but all subsequent philosophy inimical to the Church, as belonging to a bygone age. He was a fanatic, and there was a sacristy odour about all that he said. But there was in his disposition an enthusiastic ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... 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 creature. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire says: 'If God made man in His own image, man has ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... seems to have been the period of a visit to Mr. Dodington, of Eastbury, in Dorsetshire—the "pure Dorsetian downs" celebrated by Thomson—in which Young made the acquaintance of Voltaire; for in the subsequent dedication of his "Sea Piece" to "Mr. Voltaire," he recalls their meeting on "Dorset Downs;" and it was in this year that Christopher Pitt, a gentleman-poet of those days, addressed an "Epistle ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... mocking him by a guilty pretension to his power, and leading the dark into thicker darkness? Then these hands—blood!—broken vows!—ha! ha! ha! Well, go—let misery have its laugh, like the light that breaks from the thunder-cloud. Prefer Voltaire to Christ; sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind, as I have done—ha, ha, ha! Swim, world—swim about me! I have lost the ways of Providence, and am dark! She awaits me; but I broke the chain that galled us: yet it still ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... sitting-room we observed a marble recess, formerly, the old man told us, filled with books and papers, which were then in a large seaman's chest in the closet: it was open, but we did not think ourselves justified in examining the contents. On the tablet of the recess lay Voltaire's, Shakspeare's, Boileau's, and Rousseau's works complete; Volney's Ruins of Empires; Zimmerman, in the German language; Klopstock's Messiah; Kotzebue's novels; Schiller's play of the Robbers; Milton's Paradise Lost, an Italian edition, ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... protest any part of the definition of my faith. Names are things, and he who is perpetually dubbing himself a Protestant, ends by making it the first article of his creed, that Rome errs, and his active religion becomes opposition to Rome. Now I find Voltaire quite as good a Protestant ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... hell." So thinking and feeling, they had witnessed the triumph of Jefferson with genuine alarm, for Jefferson they held to be no better than a Jacobin, bent upon subverting the social order and saturated with all the heterodox notions of Voltaire ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... in vogue among the French encyclopaedists of the last century. By opposing it, even Voltaire incurred the reputation of bigotry, and Hume probably had to listen to a good deal of it on that memorable occasion when, dining with Baron D'Holbach, and intimating to his host his disbelief in the existence ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... Those who had but this one day for pleasure seemed determined to make the most of it. A wonderful contrast with that gloomy day in London, where all places of amusement were closed and nothing open to the people but the churches and drinking saloons. The streets and houses in which Voltaire, La Fayette, Mme. de Stael, Mme. Roland, Charlotte Corday, and other famous men and women lived and died, were pointed out to us. We little thought, then, of all the terrible scenes to be enacted in Paris, nor that France would emerge from the dangers that beset her ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Landor.—Voltaire, sir, was a man of abilities, and author of many passable epigrams, besides those which are contained in his tragedies and heroics, [108] though, like Parisian lackeys, they are usually the smartest when out of place. I tell you I detest and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... and Voltaire's "Candide" is so marked, that had either author seen the other's work, he must have been suspected of imitation. But while both these great minds were writing at nearly the same time on the same theme of human misery, the lessons they taught differed in a manner which is strongly ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... malice that is native to man, the spectacle of anathemas batted back; it is refreshing to see the pitchfork employed against gentlemen who have doomed such innumerable caravans to hell. In Nietzsche they found, after many long years, a foeman worthy of them—not a mere fancy swordsman like Voltaire, or a mob orator like Tom Paine, or a pedant like the heretics of exegesis, but a gladiator armed with steel and armoured with steel, and showing all the ferocious gusto of a mediaeval bishop. It is a pity that Holy Church has no process for the elevation of demons, like its process for ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... and that His most favored apostle combined slave-catching with his missionary labors. And why should it not exult? Fouler blasphemy than this was never uttered. A more monstrous libel upon the Divine Author of Christianity was never propagated by Paine or Voltaire, Kneeland or Owen; and we are constrained to regard the professor of theology or the doctor of divinity who tasks his sophistry and learning in an attempt to show that the Divine Mind looks with complacency ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... is a curious criminal process on record, manuscript 1770, noticed by Voltaire as in the library of the King of France, which was founded upon a remarkable set of visions said to have occurred to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... he weighed was the head of Voltaire, Which retained all the wit that had ever been there; As a weight, he threw in the torn scrap of a leaf Containing the prayer of the penitent thief; When the skull rose aloft with so sudden a spell That it bounced like a ball on ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... the eighteenth century, of the age of Watteau, was precisely suited to the gay and graceful pencils of Gravelot, Moreau, Eisen, Boucher, Cochin, Marillier, and Choffard. To understand their merits, and the limits of their art, it is enough to glance through a series of the designs for Voltaire, Corneille, or Moliere. The drawings of society are almost invariably dainty and pleasing, the serious scenes of tragedy leave the spectator quite unmoved. Thus it is but natural that these artists should have shone most in the illustration of airy trifles like Dorat's "Baisers," or tales like ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... Geneva, and Sedan, and became a Protestant minister in his native town. On the 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 Louis XIV.' ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... of the name of the State which he founded, will be remembered in connection with its history while the Delaware and the Schuylkill flow. Of his famous treaty with the Indians nothing, perhaps, was ever better said than the comment of Voltaire, that it was the only league between savages and white men which was never sworn to and never broken. Addison died, still comparatively young, on June 17, 1719. He had reached the highest point of his political career but a short time before, when, on one of the changes of office between ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... appliances such as were unknown in the days of those energetic and persevering men, no small praise is due to the first Christian explorers for the extraordinary correctness of their maps and records." The reports of the early Jesuit Missionaries even Voltaire describes as the "productions of the most intelligent travellers that have extended and embellished the ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... 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 ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... sorrowful books, only Aristophanes and Lucian, Horace, Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire's novels, 'Gil Blas,' 'Don Quixote,' Fielding, a play or two of Shakespeare, a volume or so of Swift, Prior's Poems, and Sterne—that divine Sterne! And a Latin Grammar and Virgil for you, little boy. ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... privateering venture. The British retaliated with vigour. The total number of captures by French and Spanish corsairs was in all probability larger than the list of British—partly for the reason given by Voltaire, namely, that more British merchants were taken because there were many more British merchant ships to take, but partly also because the British government had not yet begun to enforce the use of convoy so strictly as it did ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of the Parliament of Paris, Voltaire, whose party-spirit was ever too ready to betray his judgment, and to obscure his genius, has not hesitated, in allusion to the arrogant boast of the Italian adventurer, to express himself thus:—"This Concini, at this very time, performed an action which merited ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... really believe in you, if you give me this last race ... it will be a miracle, God, if you do this for me, and I will believe in your Bible, despite my common sense ... despite history ... despite Huxley and Voltaire," then, going as far as I could—"yes, and despite Shelley ... dear God, dear Christ, please do what I ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... upon the growth of economic truth. But in the middle of the eighteenth century an intellectual revival set in: the "Encyclopaedia" was published, Montesquieu wrote his "l'Esprit des Lois," Rousseau was beginning to write, and Voltaire was at the height of his power. In this movement political economy had an important share, and there resulted the first school ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... Histories—the Encyclopaedia Britannica—Buckle on Civilisation—all the books "in print," as it is termed. Nay, he will find no difficulty in procuring copies of others which may not happen to be on the shelves of the publisher or of the retailer of new books. Of Voltaire's works—a little library in itself—he will get a copy at his call in London, if he has not set his mind on some special edition. So of Scott's edition of Swift or Dryden, Croker's edition of Boswell's ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... 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 ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... Even Voltaire asserts that 'every gambler is, has been, or will be a robber.' Few practices are more ancient, few more general, and few, if any, more pernicious than gaming. An English writer has ingeniously suggested that the Devil himself might have been the first player, and that he contrived ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... the seed of revolution in France, only Condorcet survived to behold the first bitter ingathering of the harvest. Those who had sown the wind were no more; he only was left to see the reaping of the whirlwind, and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it. Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Helvetius, had vanished, but Condorcet both assisted at the Encyclopaedia and sat in the Convention; the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also came in due season to partake of its fruit; ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... 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, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of her country, and make her as cool in her affection to Massinissa as to Syphax. In the two latter she resembles the character of queen Elizabeth; in the two former she is the picture of Mary queen of Scotland. In short, the one Sophonisba is as different from the other as the Brutus of Voltaire is from the Marius, jun., of Otway, or as the Minerva is from the Venus ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... which to select Magistrates! In fact, I scarcely ever see a farmer, who has not some tale to 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
... along the lower rows of shelves, standing just near enough to them to read the titles on the backs of the volumes. I saw Voltaire in red morocco, Shakespeare in blue, Walter Scott in green, the "History of England" in brown, the "Annual Register" in yellow calf. There I paused, wearied and discouraged already by the long rows of volumes. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... (in Latin) with the title: Si animus cum corpore extinguitur, quid sit Deus? Quid homo? Quid societas? Quid philosophia? (If the soul dies with the body what happens to God? Man? Society? Philosophy?) And an essay in French imagining that he was Voltaire writing to his English friend Cedeville pretending to give his impressions on England. When he had arrived on 30 October 1848 Taine wrote to Cornelis de Witt: "Here I am in the convent and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... before their arrival she had been particularly bright 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 ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... brain 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. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... respect, but we have gained much in another. Our battles indeed admit but few single combats, or trials of individual prowess. They do admit them however; and it is not impossible to describe them with as much detail and interest as the nature of the action requires; as Voltaire has proved in the single combat of Aumale and Turenne in the Henriad. Had he managed his general descriptions and the other parts of the conduct of his poem as well, he would have made it a far ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... delight in paradoxes eminently agreeable. It pleased him to see the letter of the Archbishop lying upon a volume of Strauss, and to read the glowing and extravagant praise lavished on him in the pages of the "Univers" after having enjoyed a sparkling draught of Voltaire. ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... 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
... was twice sketched by Disraeli himself. The first occasion was in 1839. The picture he drew at that time was highly complimentary, but as Disraeli was then a loyal supporter of Peel it may perhaps be discarded on the plea advanced by Voltaire that "we can confidently believe only the evil which a party writer tells of his own side and the good which he recognises in his opponents." The second occasion was after Peel's death. It is given by Mr. Monypenny in ii. 306-308, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... du Mont-Saint-Michel," and if the spelling is corrected, they still read almost as easily as Voltaire; more easily than Verlaine; and much like a nursery rhyme; but as tourists cannot stop to clear their path, or smooth away the pebbles, they must be lifted over the rough spots, even when roughness is beauty. Translation is an evil, chiefly because every one who cares for mediaeval ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... their excuses! For this, too, was the man who, in a city haunted by Tractarian shades, once said to his chief biographer that "Voltaire had done more good than all the Fathers of the Church put together!"—who scornfully asks himself in his diary, a propos of the Bishops' condemnation of Essays and Reviews, "What is Truth against an esprit ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Voltaire, our England's lover, man divine Beyond all Gods that ever fear adored By right and might, by sceptre and by sword, By godlike love of sunlike truth, made thine Through godlike hate of falsehood's marshlight shine And ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... examine. He could not refuse. He found Byron's "Childe Harold" in one 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." ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Scotsman, adventurous and experienced, a character of the race which captured him and held him in leash till just before the taking of Quebec. I therefore found in the character of Doltaire—which was the character of Voltaire spelled with a big D—purely a creature of the imagination, one who, as the son of a peasant woman and Louis XV, should be an effective offset to Major Stobo. There was no hint of Doltaire in the Memoirs. There could not be, nor of the plot ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... emerging from the long tunnel of philosophising was a lawsuit with his publisher. The publisher 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 re-election to the post ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... Charlie Carstairs, the hero of the story. The details of the wars of Charles the Twelfth were taken from the military history, written at his command by his chamberlain, Adlerfeld; from a similar narrative by a Scotch gentleman in his service; and from Voltaire's history. The latter is responsible for the statement that the trade of Poland was almost entirely in the hands of Scotch, French, and Jewish merchants, the Poles themselves being sharply divided into the two categories ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... was discreet. He knew many wise proverbs and polite salutations in French and English both, most of which he has discarded in favor of your profane and foolish teachings. He is as bad as the 'Vert-vert' of Voltaire. I shall have to expel ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... those political theories which, transmitted from America to France, became the principles of the French Revolution. From England went forth the philosophy of Locke, with all its immense results. It is noteworthy, that when Voltaire tries to persuade people, in a certain famous passage, that philosophers do not care to trouble the world—of the ten names to whom he does honour, seven names are English. "It is," he says, "neither Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Boyle, ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... before his death repented of having attempted the business of printing. For four years after his death his widow continued to conduct his business. She then sold all his punches and matrices to the Societe Litteraire-typographique, which used some of the types for the sumptuous Kehl edition of Voltaire's works in ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... keeping up Voltaire's idea of our English character. Instead of only admirals, however, we are now hanging all sorts and descriptions of our public servants, but whether to encourage the others or to pay off a grudge, ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... never swerved; and though his somewhat too trustful methods were rapidly changed by stern experience, his people felt more and more the consummate wisdom of his guidance, and they became unconquerable by that truth and that faith. Almost on the first day of his reign, he invited Voltaire, the greatest of literary heroes, the most adroit and successful assaulter of king-craft and priest-craft that ever lived, to his capital and to his palace; and in a most friendly spirit consulted him on the advancement ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... the spasmodic twitchings slowly dying away. He strove to think of other things, and began reading back in his own life. He remembered his mother and his father, and the little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had taught him dancing and sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire. Once more he saw Paris, and dreary London, and gay Vienna, and Rome. And once more he saw that wild group of youths who had dreamed, even as he, the dream of an independent Poland with a king of Poland on the throne ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his mind to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world which had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his wanderings again, turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait of an idler seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end of the bridge, his notice was attracted by the second-hand books displayed on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining for some. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... 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 although the learned ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... of porters. Grass mats and leopard skins were upon the floor. In the centre, upon a heavy table, was a green shaded lamp set in a silver-mounted elephant's foot. Upon the bookcases were various odd curios, and a coffee service in copper; and from opposite sides, marbles of Bismarck and Voltaire stared into each other's eyes. On the south wall was a large oil of Kaiser Wilhelm II; and in the centre of the other wall a photograph of a woman set in an ivory frame made from a ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... thinkers of that period—we have no distinguishing name for it—which lies between the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over sixty years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and Voltaire were writing long before 1740, the great influential works of the "age of illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748. The intellectual task of this intervening period was to turn to account the ideas ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... the world, Pascal, in the "Provincial Letters," had immediate success. "All the world," we read in his friend's supposed reply to the second "Letter," "sees them; all the world understands them. Men of the world find them agreeable, and even women intelligible." A century later Voltaire found them very agreeable. The spirit in which Pascal deals with his opponents, his irony, may remind us of the "Apology" of [67] Socrates; the style which secured them immediate access to people who, as a rule, find the ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... grandfather, lived 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 whom her husband and herself were on intimate relations, and Frederick, ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... Anonymous considers unity his emphasis, like Johnson's and Hurd's, is no longer on the mechanical unities but on unity of design. "When Shakespeare's plan is understood most of the criticisms of Rymer and Voltaire vanish away," Johnson was to write some thirty years later. Anonymous holds steadily for the integrity of Shakespeare's plan in Hamlet. Of Act I, iii he says, "Concerning the Design of this scene, we shall find it is necessary ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... 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 temper at his coronation on perceiving that some of the princesses of his family who were to act as ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... world is an infinite series of analogies enclosed one within another in a succession of Chinese boxes. Even the crowd recognises this. The story that Newton first saw the gravitation of the earth in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority. But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest investigators as a vague spiral scarcely to ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... world. Well, here in Europe the work must be done by machinery; machinery must take the place of cheap Chinese labor. If we could but succeed in making a cheap paper of as good a quality, the weight and thickness of printed books would be reduced by more than one-half. A set of Voltaire, printed on our woven paper and bound, weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds; it would only weigh fifty if we used Chinese paper. That surely would be a triumph, for the housing of many books has come ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... the apple we learn from Voltaire, who had it from Newton's favourite niece, who with her husband lived and kept house for him all his later life. It is very like one of those anecdotes which are easily invented and believed in, and very often turn out on scrutiny to have no foundation. Fortunately ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... slavery. My heart is my guide: my conscience is my Bible. I wish for nothing further to satisfy me of my duty to man. If I act rightly to mankind, I shall fear nothing." Carlton had drunk too deeply of the bitter waters of infidelity, and had spent too many hours over the writings of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine, to place that appreciation upon the Bible and its teachings that it demands. During this conversation there was another person in the room, seated by the window, who, although ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... offended at being cross-examined by this layer when she had intended to beguile his judgment; but as Popinot still looked stupid from sheer absence of mind, she ended by attributing his interrogatory to the Questioning Spirit of Voltaire's bailiff. ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... which appeared a few months earlier (in 1674) with less success. Another authority was Father Bouhours, of whom see note on p. 236, vol. i. [Footnote 4 of No. 62.] Another was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. called by Voltaire the most universal genius of his age. He was born at Rouen in 1657, looking so delicate that he was baptized in a hurry, and at 16 was unequal to the exertion of a game at billiards, being caused by any unusual exercise to spit blood, though ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... possible. Later on, my grandfather lost a great deal of money, but this circumstance, which occurred after my aunt's marriage, had nothing to do with it. My grandfather,—this by the way,—was a very remarkable man, a personal friend of Voltaire. You will find interesting details about him in an amusing book published by Ernest Daudet, called La Correspondence du Comte Valentin Esterhazy, in the first volume, where among other things is described the ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... it! Just as I was about, with the velvety tones of my instrument, to imitate the twittering of little birds in the forest, you have to interrupt with your infernal din!" The caustic quality of French wit is illustrated plenteously by Voltaire. There is food for meditation in his utterance: "Nothing is so disagreeable as to be obscurely hanged." He it was, too, who sneered at England for having sixty religions and only one gravy. To an adversary in argument who quoted the minor prophet Habakkuk, he retorted contemptuously: "A person ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... everything, the planets and the motes in the sunbeam. FAUST, with his types, or LUTHER, with his sermons, worked greater results than Alexander or Hannibal. A single thought sometimes suffices to overturn a dynasty. A silly song did more to unseat James the Second than the acquittal of the Bishops. Voltaire, Condorcet, and Rousseau uttered words that will ring, in change and revolutions, throughout ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... fervently. "I cannot stand by and see the hailstorm of corruption that devastates our unhappy country. I cannot see Austria flooded with the works of French philosophers and German infidels. What is to become of religion and decency if Voltaire and Rousseau are to be ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... against the canine race! That Voltaire of a whelp, who imposed himself upon our confiding first parents, must have had an important pull at headquarters, for he certainly succeeded in getting the decree concerning beauty and fitness which applies to all mammals, including man himself, reversed in ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... so to the Sanitary Reformer, who has called on the "British Public" to exert themselves in saving the lives of thousands yearly; and has received practical answers which will furnish many a bitter jest for the Voltaire of the next so-called "age of unbelief," or fill a sad, but an instructive chapter in some future enlarged edition of Adelung's ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... here on our estates; but even I can see that a storm is gathering; and as for my brother Auguste, he goes about shaking his head and wringing his hands, his anticipations are of the darkest. What can one expect when fellows like Voltaire and Rousseau were permitted by their poisonous preaching to corrupt and inflame the imagination of the people? Both those men's heads should have been cut off the instant they began ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... were gained through musty papers from rulers of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, a nation Voltaire declared "neither holy, nor empire, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... boundless confidence in his own powers of foresight, and expected so complete a triumph of his own ideas on the reconstitution of society within the possible limits of his lifetime. If he could live (he said) to the age of Pontenelle, or of Hobbes, or even of Voltaire, he should see all this realized, or as good as realized. He died, however, at sixty, without leaving any disciple sufficiently advanced to be appointed his successor. There is now a College, and a Director, of Positivism; but Humanity no longer ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... priests—but for des gens du monde," he said to her one day, on putting down a volume of Voltaire. ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... Christian, a measure of success not possible to an adherent of the Hebrew faith. Whatever the motive, the act was a voluntary one. A great admirer of the eighteenth-century "materialists," and a disciple of Voltaire, he believed in God, he said, as Newton, Locke, and Leibnitz had done before him. He discussed religious and philosophical questions very freely and frankly with his son, and read Voltaire and Racine with him. As for the mother of Marx, she also believed in God—"not for God's sake, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... the headship of his college. Diderot was about the same age when the torments against which he had struggled for the best part of twenty arduous years in his gigantic task seemed to reach the very climax of distraction. 'My dear master,' he wrote to Voltaire, in words which it is a refreshment under the circumstances to recall and to transcribe, 'my dear master, I am over forty. I am tired out with tricks and shufflings. I cry from morning till night for rest, rest; and scarcely a day passes when ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... might satisfy his ardor for hunting." There is probably some exaggeration in the statement of the country being "extremely populous from early times." This was an old woody district, called Ytene. No forest was artificially planted, as Voltaire has imagined; but the chases were opened through the ancient thickets, and hamlets ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... wondered how he spent his time when he was alone, as he could not read. From the appearance of the room one could not guess, for the large table was covered with papers and magazines. Before the window stood a large Voltaire chair, upholstered in tapestry. The chair was rather worn. This seemed to indicate that the blind man sat for long hours face to face with the sky, the clouds of which he ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... facts accumulated on this subject, are Dr. Blumenbach, of Goettingen, Dr. Pritchard, of Edinburgh, and the eminent surgeon, Mr. Lawrence. It has been a favourite matter of speculation with Lord Monboddo, as well as with Voltaire, Rousseau, and the philosophers of the French school, who have endeavoured to show that men and other animals are endowed with reason or instinct of the same kind, but of different degrees. According to these fanciful writers, the monkey is but another species ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... forsooth, every ten minutes, lest they should work for their master half an instant after loosing-time—And then, instead of studying the Bible on the work days, to kittle the clergymen with doubtful points of controversy on the Sabbath, they glean all their theology from Tom Paine and Voltaire." ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... writers, as Raynal, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, have treated of Paraguay under Jesuit rule, but their writings are founded on hearsay evidence. A German, Father Dobrizhoffer, stands alone.* His delightful 'History of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay', is perhaps the most charming book dealing with the subject. A simple and easy ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... Shakspere "wanted art"; the highest appellate court decided that "Lear" was a greater work than Euripides or Sophocles ever produced. Voltaire, the presiding Justice in the court of French criticism, decided that Shakspere was "votre bizarre sauvage;" the world has reversed his decision, and everywhere, except perhaps in France, the "Henriade" is ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... 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
... you, and such prospects ahead? Well, thank you, at any rate,—and, as the Irish say, more power to your Honor's Glory!" This really is nearly all that said Sets of Letters contain; and except perhaps the Voltaire Set, none of them give symptoms of much capacity ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle |
