Voltaire

All pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.

Better is the enemy of good.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.

Nature has made us frivolous to console us for our miseries.

The public is a ferocious beast - one must either chain it up or flee from it.

The superfluous is very necessary.

A witty saying proves nothing.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

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

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.

History is a pack of lies we play on the dead. Indolence is sweet, and its consequences bitter.

Judge of a man by his questions rather than by his answers.

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

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

The secret of being boring is to say everything.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

To be good only to yourself is to be good for nothing.
- All from François Marie Arouet (Voltaire), 1694 - 1778

About:

Francois Marie Arouet was born at Paris on 21 Nov in 1694. He received his education at a Jesuit college there, leaving school at age 16 and soon becoming a favorite among the aristocracy for his wit. Hubris struck, after he wrote a satire of the government he spent almost a year in the Bastille and was forced into exile in England for three years. Starting with a play he wrote in prison he made quite a name for himself as a playwright and philosopher, the name he made was Voltaire.