Voltaire Art Quotations

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

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

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

We know that all the arts are brothers, that each of them illuminates another, and that a universal light results.

The rude beginnings of every art acquire a greater celebrity than the art in perfection; he who first played the fiddle was looked upon as a demigod.

Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him. ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.

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.

Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying?

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

We have our arts, the ancients had theirs... We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.

All the arts are brothers; each one is a light to the others.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

Know that the secret of the arts is to correct nature.

It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?

You must have the devil in you to succeed in the arts.

But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.

Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege.