"Voltaire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Imprisoned by the weather, the sick man was compelled to spend all his waking time in the sitting-room, where his confinement was made the more penitential by the absence of books. It happened that the only books in the house were two volumes of Voltaire, and these were taken from the younger pair one dreary Sunday by their stern parents as not proper ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... that is the logical outcome of the Revolution; and the joining of hands of a wing of the intellectuals with the most radical section of the working men, is a sign of our times not lightly to be passed over. From Voltaire before the Revolution to Anatole France, at {10} the present day, the tradition and development is ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... and companionable, to him. The Crown-Prince reads a great deal; very many French Books, new and old, he reads; among the new, we need not doubt, the Henriade of M. Arouet Junior (who now calls himself VOLTAIRE), which has risen like a star of the first magnitude in these years. [London, 1723, in surreptitious incomplete state, La Ligue the title; then at length, London, 1726, as Henriade, in splendid 4to,—by subscription (King, Prince and Princess of Wales at the top ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... becomes. To squander time is to squander all." The events of one brief day have often influenced a whole life, aye, a whole eternity. The flight of a bird determined the career of Mohammed; a spider's spinning that of Bruce; and a tear in his mother's eye that of Washington. Voltaire, when only five years old, committed to memory an infidel poem, and grew to live and die an unbeliever; whilst Doddridge, as a child, studied the Bible from the pictured tiles at the fireside explained by his mother. ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... anybody think that he was Rousseau and Voltaire rolled in one?" the cashier remarked to himself ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... broadly and in the gross. There are plenty of French authors to whom some of the traits just named could by no means be attributed, and there is certainly not a single French author to whom one could truthfully attribute them all. Voltaire insisted that what was not clear was not French,—so much, to the conception of this typical Frenchman, was clearness the genius of the national speech. Still, Montaigne, for example, was sometimes obscure; and even the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... guests were Condorcet, then in the prime of his reputation, the correspondent of the king of Prussia, the intimate of Voltaire, the member of half the academies of Europe,—noble by birth, polished in manners, republican in opinions. There, too, was the venerable Malesherbes, "l'amour et les delices de la Nation." (The idol and delight of the nation (so-called by ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... great critic Boileau, who liked him, quarrelled with him, and made up again. Forty years later, Voltaire wrote that the man who did not enjoy Regnard was not capable of appreciating Moliere. Then came M. de La Harpe, the authority in such matters for two generations: he devotes a chapter to Regnard, and calls him the worthy successor of Moliere. And Beranger, in his charming autobiography, an epilogue ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... 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 when he wrote it, Captain Duff ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... France and Holland, and continued through life on terms of cordial intimacy with Bayle, Le Clerc, and others of kindred spirit. He was relentless in his attacks on revealed religion. His hostility may be inferred from the fact that Voltaire termed him even too bitter an opponent of Christianity. Warburton says, "Mr. Pope told me that, to his knowledge, The Characteristics have done more harm to revealed religion in England than all the other works of infidelity together." Collins contributed more than any other author ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... helplessness she affected rule and sovereignty. Unhappily, at the decisive moment, I chanced (and I admit it was more than an inadvertence on my part, it was a most ill-considered thing to do) I chanced, I say, to call out—and that I refrained from quoting Voltaire is something in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this abode a passage in one of the best letters ever written by Rousseau, and addressed to Voltaire, on the subject of his poem, entitled Sur la Loi Naturelle, et sur le Desastre de Lisbonne; in which, referring to an assertion of Voltaire's that few persons would wish to live over again on the condition of enduring the same trials, ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... Giambattista della Torre made famous for his skill in astronomy, employs himself in a much more useful, if not a nobler study; and is completing for the press a new system of education. It was very petulantly, and very spitefully said by Voltaire, that Italy was now no more than la boutique[Footnote: The old clothes shop.], and the Italians, les merchands fripiers de l'Europe[Footnote: The slop-sellers of Europe]. The Greek remains here have still an air of youthful ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Moliere already held the place in his estimation which they always retained. Shakespeare he as yet knew only from the selections in Dodd's Beauties and Wieland's translation, but he already felt his greatness, and, as we have seen, names him with Wieland and Oeser as one of his masters. "Voltaire," he wrote to Oeser, "has been able to do no harm to Shakespeare; no lesser spirit will prevail over a greater one."[60] The German writers who now stood highest in his esteem were Lessing and Wieland. Lessing's aesthetic teaching he accepted with some reserves, but ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... alien to the system, and eminently disturbing in its influence. Yet its efficacy in certain forms of specific disease is acknowledged by all but the most sceptical theorists. Even the esprit moqueur of Ricord, the Voltaire of pelvic literature, submits to the time-honored constitutional authority of this great panacea in the class of cases to which he has devoted his brilliant intelligence. Still, there is no telling what evils have arisen from the abuse of this mineral. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dispersed by the Guard, carried the matter abroad, and there was no end of sympathetic exaggerations. Report ran in Berlin, for example, that the poor Princess was killed, beaten or trampled to death; which we clearly see she was not. Voltaire, in that mass of angry calumnies, very mendacious indeed, which he calls VIE PRIVEE DU ROI DE PRUSSE, mentions the matter with emphasis; and says farther, The Princess once did him (Voltaire) the "honor to show him a black mark she carried on her breast ever after;"—which is ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... thing I got out of them is an immense disgust for the French.... Not a liberal idea which has not been unpopular, not a just thing that has not caused scandal, not a great man who has not been mobbed or knifed. 'The history of the human mind is the history of human folly,' as says M. Voltaire. ... Neo-Catholicism on the one hand, and Socialism on the other, have stultified France." In another letter of the same Period and similar provocation: "However much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... opinion between us about life, books, the new city of Chicago, the destiny of America, and Douglas. Aldington was keeping abreast with all the new books in America and England as well. He too had read De Tocqueville; but he was also familiar with Rousseau, Voltaire, the French Encyclopaedists; with Locke. And he assured me that Calhoun, the Senator from South Carolina, had written a treatise on the philosophy of government which for depth and dialectic power, was ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... borders of Turkey—this is indeed a wide reign and a proud distinction; but prouder still to be not only read, but to have subjugated, as it were, and moulded the literary tastes of the civilized world. Voltaire is the writer who, in his lifetime, has approached nearest to this extent of popularity. Sovereigns courted and corresponded with him; his own countrymen were enthusiastic in his praise; and so general was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, "the courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] and his work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and barbarous." A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... among the learned and, equally, as a radical and revolutionary influence among the unlearned. It had momentous practical consequences. In no sphere was it more radical than in that of religion. Not in vain had Voltaire for years cried, 'Ecrasez l'infame,' and Rousseau preached that the youth would all be wise and pure, if only the kind of education which he had had in the religious schools were made impossible. There was for many minds no alternative ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... at that time regarded in the more civilized parts of Europe somewhat in the same light as the Arctic regions are now considered by the inhabitants of England, and other polished nations: "When I was at Ferney in 1764," Boswell relates, "I mentioned our design (of going to the Hebrides) to Voltaire. He looked at me as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, 'You do not insist on my accompanying you!' 'No, sir.' 'Then I am very willing you should go.'" In this remote, and, in the circles of London, almost unknown region, Flora ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... 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 ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... had been actively scattering 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... could not help wishing that the fashion of Moliere's day had allowed him to write all his plays in prose. Moliere was not a poet, and he knew that he was not a poet. When he ventured to write the most Shakespearean of his comedies, "L'Avare," in prose, "le meme prejuge," Voltaire tells us, "qui avait fait tomber 'le Festin de Pierre,' parce qu'il etait en prose, nuisit au succes de 'l'Avare.' Cependant le public qui, a la longue, se rend toujours au bon, finit par donner a cet ouvrage les applaudissements qu'il merite. On comprit alors qu'il peut y avoir de fort bonnes comedies ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... civility, find all the force of my onslaught destroyed by a simple policy of non-resistance. In vain do I redouble the violence of the language in which I proclaim my heterodoxies. I rail at the theistic credulity of Voltaire, the amoristic superstition of Shelley, the revival of tribal soothsaying and idolatrous rites which Huxley called Science and mistook for an advance on the Pentateuch, no less than at the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... the first time that a French literary man had devoted himself to the cause of the oppressed, and made it his personal affair, his charge, his inalienable trust. But Voltaire's championship of the persecuted Protestant had not the measure of Zola's championship of the persecuted Jew, though in both instances the courage and the persistence of the vindicator forced the reopening of the case and resulted in final justice. It takes nothing from the heroism of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... he could not do without my conversation for more than two hours together. What was I to do, my Gabrielle? I walked out to avoid him. He found me in the woods—rallied me on my taste for solitude, and quoted Voltaire. ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, [Footnote: Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.] and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... institution, its effect in restraining the violence of feudal anarchy was incalculable; long anterior to the date of the philosophers, he will look for the broad foundation on which national character and institutions, for good or for evil, have been formed. Voltaire was of great service to history, by turning it from courts and camps to the progress of literature, science, and the arts—to the delineation of manners, and the preparation of anecdotes descriptive of character; but, notwithstanding all his talent, he never got a glimpse of the general causes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... describes a mulatto woman who 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 seen ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... double chin, the powdered hair, the black silk coat, the lace jabot, are all in keeping with our conception of this French dramatist, whom a competent critic[1] of to-day has classed as greater than any of his contemporaries in the same field, than Beaumarchais, Voltaire, Regnard, Le Sage, and second only to Moliere, Corneille, and Racine. Marivaux, whose rehabilitation has come but slowly, and in spite of many critics, occupies a place to-day, not only with the ultra-refined, but in the hearts of the theatre-going public, which, I doubt not, even the ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... 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 towards the whole plot of ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... he related the vision to his brethren, and assured them that it was as defined and perfect 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
... Under his influence the movement quickly waned. During the latter part of the eighteenth century it was overpowered by a wave of religious rationalism which engulfed the greater part of the intellectual classes and the younger clergy. The intelligentsia adopted Voltaire and Rousseau as their prophets and talked endlessly of the new age of enlightenment in which religion was to be shorn of its mysteries and people were to be delivered from the ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... general effect. But the first class of writers have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three first are but infants to the three second; and ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... advanced style of Oriental art, and the soil on which it rises, in the wilderness amongst the native Hebrew nomad tribes, who are represented as having got it ready offhand, and without external help. The incompatibility has long been noticed, and gave rise to doubts as early as the time of Voltaire. These may, however, be left to themselves; suffice it that Hebrew tradition, even from the time of the judges and the first kings, for which the Mosaic tabernacle was strictly speaking intended, knows ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... protests as a woman, and her dreams as an artist. But the nineteenth-century writer did not confine his ambitions to this modest task. He belonged to a corporation which counted among its members Voltaire and Rousseau. The eighteenth-century philosophers had changed the object of literature. Instead of an instrument of analysis, they had made of it a weapon for combat, an incomparable weapon for attacking institutions and for overthrowing governments. The fact is, that from ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... letters, himself the marked man of all Europe, and the centre of a school of wits, who daily gathered round his chair and tobacco-pipe at Will's. Pope dedicated his Iliad to him;(62) Swift, Addison, Steele, all acknowledge Congreve's rank, and lavish compliments upon him. Voltaire went to wait upon him as on one of the Representatives of Literature—and the man who scarce praises any other living person, who flung abuse at Pope, and Swift, and Steele, and Addison—the Grub ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... See pp. 26, etc. In replying to Voltaire, Johnson has in view, throughout the whole preface, the essay Du Theatre anglais, par Jerome Carre, 1761 (Oeuvres, 1785, vol. 61). He apparently ignores the earlier Discours sur la tragedie a Milord ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... appropriate for its manifestations; for it is worthy of remark that they occur almost exclusively on temples and their attached porches, and never on enclosing walls, gateways, and other non-religious structures. Our ideas of propriety, according to Voltaire, lead us to suppose that a ceremony (like the worship of Priapus) which appears to us infamous, could only be invented by licentiousness; but it is impossible to believe that depravity of manners would ever have led among any people to the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... The Jewish Encyclopaedia. Such a preservation of tone is admirable, for it is a subtly restrained acidity, requiring either intense and unremitting care (which seems unlikely) or a special adjustment of temperament. It is very Gaulish, it must have been modelled on Voltaire: but it is also enlivened with flashes of irresponsibility that ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... depth of laborious imbecility, to which the trifling of schoolmen and academicians is as nothing. It is to solve the enigma of Dante's works by imagining for him a character in which it is hard to say which predominates, the pedant, mountebank, or infidel. After that we may read Voltaire's sneers with patience, and even enter with gravity on the examination of Father Hardouin's historic doubts. The fanaticism of an outraged liberalism, produced by centuries of injustice and despotism, is but a poor excuse for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 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
... benevolent effort to take the burthen from the proprietors of the genuine Ebony, it is fair that the French coadjutor should have his share of the honour. His name is given as HECTOR BOSSANGE; and his shop, if I rightly remember, adorns the Quai Voltaire. And, now I think of it, I advise you, dear Godfrey, to skip across the Channel this summer, and alight on the capital, (where very likely they will just be getting up an emeute in honour of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... invitation of that monarch to go to Berlin. Frederick II., the conqueror of Rossbach, and one of the greatest of modern soldiers, was a passionate lover of literature and art, and it was his pride to collect at his court all the leading lights of European culture. He was not only the patron of Voltaire, whose connection with the Prussian monarch has furnished such rich material to the anecdote-history of literature, but of all the distinguished painters, poets, and musicians, whom he could persuade by his munificent offers (but ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... bubble about you!' Yes, Vernon, and I believe the fellow looks up to you as the head of the establishment. I am not jealous. Provided he attends to his functions! There's a French philosopher who's for naming the days of the year after the birthdays of French men of letters. Voltaire-day, Rousseau-day, Racine-day, so on. Perhaps Vernon will inform ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a stained and engraved sheet of paper—a fly-leaf detached from a book of Voltaire. And above the scroll-encompassed title was written in faded ink: "Le Capitaine Vicomte Louis Jean de Contrecoeur du Regiment de la Reine." And under that, in a woman's fine handwriting: "Mon coeur, malgre; mon coeur, se rendre a Contrecoeur, dit ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... everybody who is not a "professional" silenced or snubbed, if he ventures into any field of knowledge which he has not made especially his own. I like to read Montaigne's remarks about doctors, though he never took a medical degree. I can even enjoy the truth in the sharp satire of Voltaire on the medical profession. I frequently prefer the remarks I hear from the pew after the sermon to those I have just been hearing from the pulpit. There are a great many things which I never expect to comprehend, but which I desire very much to ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the German excitement about the colonies of England is only a half understanding of what was once heroic and is now largely caddish. The German Emperor's naval vision is a bad copy of Nelson, as certainly as Frederick the Great's verses were a bad copy of Voltaire. ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... sight of drunken people upsets him; and as to beating anyone before him, you musn't dare to do it. Then he won't enter the service; his health is delicate, forsooth! Bah! What an effeminate creature!—and all because his head is full of Voltaire!" The old man particularly disliked Voltaire, and also the "infidel" Diderot, although he had never read a word of their works. Reading was not in ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... 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
... England in 1240, he became a monk of the order of St. Francis. He was by far the most learned man of his age; and his acquirements were so much above the comprehension of his contemporaries, that they could only account for them by supposing that he was indebted for them to the devil. Voltaire has not inaptly designated him "De l'or encroute de toutes les ordures de son siecle;" but the crust of superstition that enveloped his powerful mind, though it may have dimmed, could not obscure the brightness of his genius. To him, and apparently ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... 3. Voltaire, however, held a different opinion. He thought a powerful effect might be produced by the exhibition of the blind king, indistinctly seen in the back ground, amid the shrieks of Jocasta, and the exclamations of the Thebans; provided the actor was capable ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... keenest of the latter Quinet was. If newspapers were forbidden to be brought into the College: he had a regular supply of the most liberal. If all books but those first submitted to approval were tabu: Quinet was thrice caught reading Voltaire. If criticism of any of the doctrines of Catholic piety was a sin to be expiated hardly even by months of penance: there was nothing sacred to his inquiries, from the authority of the Popes of Avignon to the stigma miracle of the Seraphic St. ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... this association helped greatly to increase his knowledge of the literary world. He read literature, history, travels, philosophy, politics and such authors as Lamennais, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Horace Say, Ricardo and the like. He read not only because of his love of reading but because he was ambitious to prepare himself for larger duties. The largest duty as he seemed to see it ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... results effected by dint of sheer industry and perseverance, have led many distinguished men to doubt whether the gift of genius be so exceptional an endowment as it is usually supposed to be. Thus Voltaire held that it is only a very slight line of separation that divides the man of genius from the man of ordinary mould. Beccaria was even of opinion that all men might be poets and orators, and Reynolds that they might be ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... reading through the best authors and orators of our country—to get a perfect command of language and style—as Hooker, Taylor, Burke, Canning, Erskine, Fox, etc., after which I shall take to French literature, and make myself as well acquainted with Voltaire, Moliere, Bossuet, Massillon, Flechier, and Condorcet, as I am with Mme. de Stael and Rousseau and Montesquieu and Volney. This will be work enough for another year; and what fit may then come upon me, it is impossible to ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... name given to several persons in France, who entered into a combination to overthrow the religion of Jesus, and eradicate from the human heart every religious sentiment. The man more particularly to whom this idea first occurred, was Voltaire, who being weary (as he said himself) of hearing it repeated that twelve men were sufficient to establish Christianity, resolved to prove that one might be sufficient to overturn it. Full of this project, he swore, before the year 1730, to devote ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... rest. After his return, he began to intrigue against the court. He was a man of common abilities, greedy of money and power, and scarcely seeking even the decency of a pretext to cover his mean ambition. His chief honor—an honor somewhat equivocal—is, as Voltaire observes, to have been father of the great Conde. Busy with his intrigues, he cared little for colonies and discoveries; and his rank and power were his sole qualifications for ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Man as in any higher sense the object of Divine care than a pig? Still stronger does the case appear when we remember that those countless adaptations of means to ends in nature, which since the time of Voltaire and Paley we have been accustomed to cite as evidences of creative design, have received at the hands of Mr. Darwin a very different interpretation. The lobster's powerful claw, the butterfly's gorgeous tints, the rose's delicious fragrance, the ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... both descended from the same Indo-Germanic original. Voltaire was thus, superficially, right when he described etymology as a science in which the vowels do not count at all and the consonants ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... together many delightful French and English works, among which may be mentioned those of the learned Dr. Smollett, of the ingenious Mr. Henry Fielding, of the graceful and fantastic Monsieur Crebillon the younger, whom our immortal poet Gray so much admired, and of the universal Monsieur de Voltaire. Once, when Mr. Crawley asked what the young people were reading, the governess replied "Smollett." "Oh, Smollett," said Mr. Crawley, quite satisfied. "His history is more dull, but by no means so dangerous as that of Mr. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... advanced. So that I trust the world and his friends may be hopeful, with good reason, that the life and faculties of this man, who has during the last six and twenty years diffused more innocent pleasure than ever fell to the lot of any human being to do in his own life-time, may be spared. Voltaire, no doubt, was full as extensively known, and filled a larger space probably in the eye of Europe; for he was a great theatrical writer, which Scott has not proved himself to be, and miscellaneous to that degree, that there was something for all classes of readers: ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... replied, rallying, "that I am in the least shaken because I see that the difficulty is greater than I have looked for. Your simile of ants is not correct. Great things can be done by individuals. Voltaire and Rousseau revolutionized French thought from the top to the bottom. Why should not a great woman some day rise and exercise as great influence over her sex as these two Frenchmen did? But do not let us talk about that any more. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... 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
... Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Theocritus, Plutarch; Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, Petrarch; Cervantes, Calderon, Camoens; Moliere, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire; Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant; Swedenborg; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and perhaps Burns and ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... brain.[75] Of course, we recognize at once 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 ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... to foot, said to them: 'Ye are brave fellows; but I had rather see the men a quibus tot vulnera accepistis—from whom ye received so many wounds.' The number of witty retorts and droll stories associated with the names of Talleyrand, Piron, Voltaire—in fact, to a certain degree, of almost all great men—is so great as to almost persuade the reader who wanders in the neglected field of ancient humor, that no man of the later centuries was ever capable of a single witty and original thought. It is not long since I met with an anecdote, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... A candid man of affairs. It is related of Voltaire that one night he and some traveling companion lodged at a wayside inn. The surroundings were suggestive, and after supper they agreed to tell robber stories in turn. "Once there was a Farmer-General of the Revenues." Saying nothing more, he was encouraged to continue. "That," ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... mais vous m'epouvantez; Ces pieges-la sont-ils bien ajustes? Craignez vous point de vous laisser surprendre Dans les filets que vos mains savent tendre?" VOLTAIRE. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... great Epictetus, when in slavery, had a master whose favourite amusement was pinching his leg, which, as the amusement ended in breaking that limb, was worse than the stocks. He also told him the anecdote of Lenny's own gallant countryman, Admiral Byng, whose execution gave rise to Voltaire's celebrated witticism, "En Angleterre on tue un ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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. ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... whole. He taught eternal punishment and retribution, reconciling both with Divine love and mercy; he liked to defeat the infidel with the crashing question, "Who then was the architect of the Universe?" The celebrated among such persons he pursued to their deathbeds; Voltaire and Rousseau owed their reputation, with many persons in Knox Church, to their last moments and to Dr Drummond. He had a triumphant invective which drew the mind from chasms in logic, and a tender sense of poetic beauty which drew it, when he quoted great lines, from everything else. He loved the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... words are their own by the indefeasible title of conquest. Life is spent in learning the meaning of great words, so that some idle proverb, known for years and accepted perhaps as a truism, comes home, on a day, like a blow. "If there were not a God," said Voltaire, "it would be necessary to invent him." Voltaire had therefore a right to use the word, but some of those who use it most, if they would be perfectly sincere, should enclose it in quotation marks. ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... men who fought against Christianity, at least ostensibly, under the banner of Deism or Natural Religion; the second Revolution was consummated under the auspices, not of a Deistic, but of an Atheistic philosophy. The school of Voltaire and Rousseau has given place to the school of Comte and Leroux. The difference between the two indicates a rapid and alarming advance. It may not be apparent at first sight, or on a superficial survey; but it will become evident to any one who compares the two French Encyclopaedias, which ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... Catholicism, Supremacy, Papal v. Protestant Persecutions. Your Humble Servant arrives at 11 Warwick Gardens to meet Mr. Mawer Cowtan, Master Sidney Wells and Master William Wells. Conversation about Frederick the Great, Voltaire and Macaulay. Cheerful and enlivening discourse on Germs, Dr. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... mother was a daughter of George I. Frederick loved her, and from her he inherited a taste for music and literature, like many of the family of the Georges. He formed an intimate friendship with Voltaire, the French infidel writer, and interested himself in the French infidelity of the period, which was a reaction against the ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... of mere policy but of heartfelt need. Marcus Aurelius was a great immolator of white cows. The Christians were disliked, not as superstitious, but as impious. Alexander of Abunoteichos expelled 'Christians and Epicureans' by name from his séances. Lucian is the Voltaire of a credulous age. As for sacerdotal magic, Ovid explicitly ascribed the ex opere operato ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Rou, traces a similar analogy between the Trojan Brutus and Britain. Later French poets have attempted epics, more or less popular in their time, among which are Alaric by Scuderi, Clovis by St. Sorlin, and two poems on La Pucelle, one by Chapelain, and the other by Voltaire. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... Sans Souci for the great Frederick's sake, and they drove through a lively shower to the palace, where they waited with a horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnade before they were led through Voltaire's room and Frederick's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in the 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 accessories of books and flowers, shows the care in its execution; but it wants expression, ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... then by a step, a whisper, the sound of a book being moved from its shelf where perhaps it had stood unread for years, or occasional voices passing outside or snatches of song from the campus. And here I thought I was finding myself. That French prof had introduced me to Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac, Maupassant and others who were becoming my new idols. This was art, this was beauty and truth, this was getting at life in a ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... tracts in various languages on the subject of this persecution are innumerable. An eminently clear, terse, and spirited summary will be found in Voltaire's Siecle de Louis XIV.] ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... plays to improve his circumstances, but offended both his bishop and the public. At last he was presented to the very valuable living of Upcerne, in Dorsetshire, and was also successful with a translation of Mahomet of Voltaire, but died within the year after his induction. The Man of Taste was printed for J. Watts, MDCCXXXV., and is dedicated to Lord Weymouth. We give ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... remark is not prompted by jealousy, for I have the book myself, and seldom fail to find the list of subscribers interesting, for, among many other famous names, it contains those of 'Mr. Gray, Peter's College, Cambridge,' 'Mr. Samuel Richardson, editor of Clarissa, two books,' and 'Mr. Voltaire, Historiographer of France.' There are various Johnsons among the subscribers, but not Samuel, who apparently would liefer pray with Kit Smart than buy his poetry, thereby showing the doctor's ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... little 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. They ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... would not permit even Cardinal de Fleury to put his red stockings beneath his council-table," remarked a strict martinet of La Serre; "and here we have a whole flock of black gowns darkening our regimentals! What would Voltaire say?" ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of the Wife of Bath: story of the young knight saved by an old sorceress, whom he marries and who recovers her youth and beauty; the first original of this old legend is not known; same story in Gower (Story of Florent), and in Voltaire: "Ce qui plait aux Dames."—Friar's tale: a summoner taken away by the devil, from one of the old collections of exempla.—Tale of the Summoner (somnour, sompnour): a friar ill-received by a moribund; a coarse, popular story, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... and Voltaire it was a mere squabble of the monks; to others it was the cupidity of secular sovereigns and lay nobility grasping for the power, estates, and riches of the Church. Some treat of it as a simple reaction against religious scandals, with no great depths of principle ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... Frederickshall, in Norway (1718). At the moment of his death he was only thirty-six years of age. He was the strangest character of the eighteenth century. Perhaps we can understand him best by regarding him, as his biographer Voltaire says we must regard him, as an old Norse sea-king, born ten centuries ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... mistress! Yes, I know The coffee-house that hatched it—to be scotched, Nay, killed, before one snuff-box could say "snap," Had not one cold malevolent face been there Listening,—that crystal-minded lover of truth, That lucid enemy of all lies,—Voltaire. I am told he is doing much to spread the light Of Newton's great discoveries, there, in France. There's little fear that France, whose clear keen eyes Have missed no morning in the realm of thought, Would fail to see it; and smaller ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... have the credit of its introduction; were he to have admitted that, he would have had to explain away the divine origin of the rite,—something that the Hebrew has tenaciously held for over thirty-seven centuries. Voltaire thought it would simplify the subject by making it originate with the Egyptians, from whom the Hebrews were to borrow it. To do this he adopted the relation of Herodotus on the subject. His treatment of the Jewish race, however, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... literature, at home and abroad, but because of her own writings. One of her comedies, "O, Ye Times! O, Ye Manners!" is still occasionally given on the stage. Her own Memoirs and her Correspondence with Voltaire, Diderot, and others, furnish invaluable pictures of contemporary views and manners. Her satires, comedies, and journalistic work and polemical articles are most important, however, because most original. In 1769 she began to publish a newspaper called "All Sorts ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of a thousand years. All the repressed passions which civilisation had sought, however imperfectly, to curb, stalked abroad destructive as flood and fire. The great generation of the Encyclopaedists had passed away, and the teachings of Rousseau had prevailed over those of Montesquieu and Voltaire. The sober sense of the economists was swept aside by the sound and fury of the demagogues, and France was become a very Babel of tongues. The old malady of words had swept over the world ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... d'Arc," in which, to the indignation of the critics, the heroine was seen at last surrounded by real flames! or "Le Vieux de la Montagne" of M. Latour de St. Ybars. With better fortune Rachel appeared in the same author's "Virginie," and in the "Lucrece" of Ponsard. Voltaire's "Oreste" was revived for her in 1845 that she might play Electre. She personated Racine's "Athalie" in 1847, assuming long white locks, painting furrows on her face, and disguising herself beyond recognition, in her determination to seem completely the character she had undertaken. In 1848 she ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... to himself in adynamic fashion, the nobleman walked mechanically on until he reached the great cathedral. The organ was rolling and voices arose sweet as those of seraphim. He hesitated at the portal and then laughed to himself. "Well has Voltaire said: 'Pleasure has its time; so, too, has wisdom. Make love in thy youth, and in old age, attend to thy salvation.'" He repeated the latter words, but, although he paused at the threshold and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... it. Notwithstanding these habits have become a second nature, they are still a false nature, and give a painfully stiff and constrained air to society. The Swedes pride themselves on being the politest people in Europe. Voltaire called them the "Frenchmen of the North," and they are greatly flattered by the epithet. But how much better, to call themselves Swedes?—to preserve the fine, manly characteristics of their ancient stock, rather than imitate a people so alien to ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... expense of the people, but sold portions of their monopolies to grasping, rapacious underlings, who conveyed the grievance into every corner of the land. These people became a hated and oppressive class, like the farmers of the revenue in France. According to a well-known anecdote, Voltaire, when in a company, each member of which had to tell some tragic story, was called upon in his turn. He said: 'There was once a farmer-general—you know the rest!' The same might have been said of the monopolists in the time of King James. One of them, indeed, has become in a manner illustrious ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... 'Oedipus' des Sophokles muss in der Welt kein Stck mehr Gewalt ber unsere Leidenschaften haben als 'Othello,' als 'Knig Lear,' als 'Hamlet' u.s.w. Hat Corneille ein einziges Trauerspiel, das Sie nur halb so gerhret htte als die 'Zaire' des Voltaire? Und die 'Zaire' des Voltaire, wie weit ist sie unter dem 'Mohren von Venedig,' dessen schwache Copie sie ist, und von welchem der ganze ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... the minds of men, over every cast and shade of intellect, as that which emanated from Rousseau between 1749 and 1762. It was the first attempt to re-erect the edifice of human belief after the purely iconoclastic efforts commenced by Bayle, and in part by our own Locke, and consummated by Voltaire; and besides the superiority which every constructive effort will always enjoy over one that is merely destructive, it possessed the immense advantage of appearing amid an all but universal scepticism as to the soundness of all foregone knowledge ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... with instruments and 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 fields ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... many acquaintances who offered to patronize him. M. Boyer d'Agen, who has recently published the works of Jasmin, with a short preface and a bibliography,{4} says that he first began business as a hairdresser in the Cour Saint-Antoine, now the Cour Voltaire. When the author of this memoir was at Agen in the autumn of 1888, the proprietor of the Hotel du Petit St. Jean informed him that a little apartment had been placed at Jasmin's disposal, separated from the Hotel by the entrance to the courtyard, and that ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... in this manner, 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 ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... he intended to bring me with him. I do not know how she found out that I had, in the very heart of the Faubourg Saint Germain, an old aunt, a real duchess, who was recognized as an authority whose dicta could not be disputed by any noble family to be found from the Quai Voltaire to the Rue de Babylone, which, as all the world knows, are the frontiers of that, the most aristocratic quarter of Paris. Madame de Girardin knew that my aunt was in a position to open to vanity the portals of some noble houses which talents and fame alone ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 of Comana, mentions it in connection ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... success, I think, to his thorough digestion and effective use of Cicero's letters, which have the faculty of making one acquainted with Cicero just as if he were a modern man. During a sojourn on the shores of Lake Geneva, I read two volumes of Voltaire's private correspondence, and later, while passing the winter in Rome, the four volumes of Cicero's letters in French. I could not help thinking that in the republic of letters one was not in time at a far greater distance from Cicero than from Voltaire. While the impression of nearness ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... 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 had enough intelligence in that time to know what constituted ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... doesn't eat; he can't bear the heat and close smell of the room; the sight of folks drunk upsets him, one daren't beat any one before him; he doesn't want to go into the government service; he's weakly, as you see, in health; fie upon him, the milksop! And all this because he's got his head full of Voltaire." The old man had a special dislike to Voltaire, and the "fanatic" Diderot, though he had not read a word of their words; reading was not in his line. Piotr Andreitch was not mistaken; his son's head for that matter was indeed full of both Diderot and Voltaire, and not only ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... the learned 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] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... period of time I made the acquaintance of Monsieur Edmond About. When I met him he had just appeared as an author, and his friends everywhere declared that Voltaire's mantle had fallen on his shoulders. He had, like Voltaire, discovered instantly that mankind were divided into hammers and anvils, and he determined to be one of the hammers. He began his career by ridiculing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... fifteenth century, among intellectuals and aristocrats was very much the same as that which prevailed at the courts of France, Prussia and Russia at the end of the eighteenth century. Princes and nobles extended to Voltaire similar favours, and for the same reasons. As long as their situation in the State was not threatened, they encouraged doctrines and intellectual pursuits which, besides providing them with fresh interests and distractions, ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... of Rome, which they celebrated in noble though unskilled verse. Naevius. Ennius, Accius, Hostius, Bibaculus, and Varius before Virgil, Lucan and Silius after him, treated national subjects, some of great antiquity, some almost contemporaneous. But they failed, as Voltaire failed, because historical events are not by themselves the natural subjects of heroic verse. Tasso chose a theme where history and romance were so blended as to admit of successful epic treatment; but such conditions are ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... of hair, bore a vague resemblance to a block of granite. A few gray locks on either side of his head fell straight to the collar of his greasy coat, which was buttoned to the chin. He resembled both Voltaire and Don Quixote; he was, apparently, scoffing but melancholy, full of disdain and philosophy, but half-crazy. He seemed to have no shirt. His beard was long. A rusty black cravat, much worn and ragged, exposed a protuberant ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... signs with various commodities. A variety of things, among them little shifts, petticoats, and corsets, were fairly spread upon the ground on the bridges and in the streets. The famous basin, about which there have been such disputes, is little worth. Voltaire wonders at the English and French waging war "for a few acres of snow"; he might with equal propriety have laughed at them for fighting about a slop-basin. The pont-tournant is well worth seeing, and for those who have strong legs and who have breakfasted, it is worth while to climb the ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... easy to perceive in it an intellectual tendency far in advance of its age—a spirit which, however trammelled by antiquated conventions, yet claims kinship with that of Rabelais, or even that of Voltaire. Jean de Meung was not a great artist; he wrote without distinction, and without sense of form; it is his bold and voluminous thought that gives him a high place in French literature. In virtue alike of his popularization ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... criticisms on contemporary writers were sometimes just, but are frequently disfigured by undue vehemence and coarseness. Among his other numerous works may be mentioned a useful Dictionary and Grammar of the Italian Language, and a dissertation on Shakespeare and Voltaire. His collected works were published at Milan ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... been confined to her bed for six weeks with an attack of brain fever, and, on her recovery, had become reconciled to the Church, and broken off her connection with that notorious skeptic, Monsieur de Voltaire. He remembered the terrible night when the wicked Lord Canterville was found choking in his dressing-room, with the knave of diamonds halfway down his throat, and confessed, just before he died, that he had cheated Charles James Fox out of L50,000 at Crockford's by ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... shaded by a worn-out, three-cornered hat, his dirty uniform strewn with snuff; and his meagre legs encased in high-topped, unpolished boots; his only companion a greyhound, old and joyless as his master. Neither the bust of Voltaire, with its beaming, intelligent face, nor those of his friends, Lord-Marshal Keith and the Marquis d'Argens, could win an affectionate glance from the lonely old king. He whom Europe distinguished as the Great Frederick, whom ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... soul-havoc of a Rousseau, going on with a very enthusiasm of iniquity, with fiery imagination seizing upon all the impulsive natures of his day? or David Hume, who employed his life as a spider employs its summer, in spinning out silken webs to trap the unwary? or Voltaire, the most learned man of his day, marshaling a great host of skeptics, and leading them out in the dark land of infidelity? or Gibbon, who showed an uncontrollable grudge against religion in his history of one of the most fascinating periods of the world's ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... in progress, Haydon decided to put in a side group with Voltaire as a sceptic, and Newton as a believer. This idea, founded on the intentional anachronisms of some of the old masters, was afterwards extended, Hazlitt being introduced as an investigator, and Wordsworth ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... nation. But anyhow both men were particularly modern in their whole mood and mind. They were modern to the extent of being not only anti-traditional, but almost anti-patriotic. Peter forced the science of the West on Russia to the regret of many Russians. Frederick talked the French of Voltaire and not the German of Luther. The two experiments were entirely in the spirit of Voltairean rationalism; they were built in broad daylight by men who believed in nothing but the light of common day; and already their day ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... friends? Are they the idle boys who send me bouquets and never mention my name without looking unutterable things? Have I no tastes, no likings, no feelings, no emotions? In the name of God, was I created only to memorize so many lines of Racine, Corneille, or Voltaire per diem?" ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... astonishment that Montaigne was an unbeliever, a skeptic, almost a cynic. I was extremely indignant; he seemed to me to be a very pious gentleman, with that wit and humour which I seldom found in professedly pious books; and to this day I cannot hear Montaigne talked of as a precursor of Voltaire without believing that there is something crooked in the mind of the talker. So much for the impressions made in youth, so much for the long, long thoughts of ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... brought to their attention that the packers could not ship meat unless they had cans and that cans could not be made without tin and that tin could not be made without palm oil the British Government consented to let us buy a little of their palm oil. The lesson is that of Voltaire's story, "Candide," "Let us cultivate our own garden"—and plant a few palm trees in it—also rubber trees, but that ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... his philanthropy changes its form, but it is never chilled. Even when he wanders into error, it is from his search for truth. That humanity which the French writers of the last century sought to preach, Schiller took from the scoffing wit of Voltaire, and the unhealthy enthusiasm of Rousseau, to invest it with the thoughtful sweetness and the robust vigour of his own great soul. And we believe that no one can depart from the attentive study of that divine bequest he has left the world, without ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... renewed my father, "that, as a general rule, the process of courtship tends to the spruceness, and even foppery, of the individual engaged in the experiment, as Voltaire has very prettily proved somewhere. Nay, the Mexicans, indeed, were of opinion that the lady at least ought to continue those cares of her person even after marriage. There is extant, in Sahagun's History of New Spain, the advice of an Aztec ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... see that even I, living in his home and seeing him almost every hour of the day, have little chance to talk with him. Last night we met M. Voltaire—dramatist and historian—now in the evening of his days. We were at the Academy, where we had gone to hear an essay by D'Alembert. Franklin and Voltaire—a very thin old gentleman of eighty-four, with piercing black eyes—sat side ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... interesting, were for Richard an armoury whence he girded himself for the battles of the day; cheap reprints or translations of Malthus, of Robert Owen, of Volney's 'Ruins,' of Thomas Paine, of sundry works of Voltaire, ranked upon his shelves. Moreover, there was a large collection of pamphlets, titled wonderfully and of yet more remarkable contents, the authoritative utterances of contemporary gentlemen—and ladies—who made it ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... to excite a communion of soul. Hilda was clever and well-read, with a deep love for the beautiful, and a familiar acquaintance with all modern literature. There was not a beautiful spot on the road which had been sung by poets or celebrated in fiction of which she was ignorant. Ferney, sacred to Voltaire; Geneva, the birth-place of Rousseau; the Jura Alps, sung by Byron; the thousand places of lesser note embalmed by French or German writers in song and story, were all greeted by her with a delight that was girlish in its enthusiastic demonstrativeness. Lord Chetwynde, himself ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Voltaire says "No:" he tells you that Candide Found life most tolerable after meals;[277] 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 oppression ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the National Guard, government commissioner in a joint-stock company; also provided with an inspectorship in the king's house, he became Chevalier de Saint-Louis and officer of the Legion of Honor. An open follower of Voltaire, but an attendant at mass, at all times a Bertrand in pursuit of a Raton, egotistic and vain, a glutton and a libertine, this man of intellect, sought after in all social circles, a kind of minister's "household drudge," openly lived, until ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... I'm 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 ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... 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, Theophile ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... Messalina. To set herself right in the eyes of Europe, she paid eager court to that hierarchy of scepticism which in that age made or marred European reputations. She flattered the fierce deists by owning fealty to "Le Roi" Voltaire; she flattered the mild deists by calling in La Harpe as the tutor of her grandson; she flattered the atheists by calling in Diderot as a tutor ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... widely-sundered currents, to the same uncharted deep. Alfieri, at any rate, represented to the younger lad the seer who held in his hands the keys of knowledge and beauty. Odo could never forget the youth who first leant him Annibale Caro's Aeneid and Metastasio's opera libretti, Voltaire's Zaire and the comedies of Goldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion's sympathy with his own half-dormant tastes the first incentive to a nobler activity. Certain it is that, in the interchange of their daily comradeship, the elder gave his ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... oppress your exhausted stomach. If you can, drink your coffee without sugar, for then it preserves its natural flavour, and is much more efficacious than when mixed with other ingredients. Laugh at the doctors who tell you that hot coffee irritates the stomach and injures the nerves; tell them that Voltaire, Fontenelle, Stacey, and Fourcroy, who were great coffee-drinkers, lived to a good ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... crowned head which for thirty years has desired to visit France, but I have always turned a deaf ear, and will resist it as long as possible." "Who, sire, is the king so unfortunate as to banished by you from your majesty's presence?" "Who? The king of philosophers, the rival of Voltaire, my brother of Prussia. Ah, my dear baronne, he is a bad fellow; he detests me, and I have no love for him. A king does wisely, certainly, to submit his works to the judgment of a Freron! It would be outrageous scandal if he came here. Great and small would crowd around him, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... 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
... linguistic burdens of mankind. Lord Marischal as the governor of Neufchatel had acted as the protector of Rousseau, and so was able to furnish his companion with a letter of introduction, hinting at his enthusiastic nature and describing him to the philosopher as a visionary hypochondriac. Voltaire he interviewed at Ferney, and he managed to please the great man by repeating—a characteristic trait of Bozzy, who believed such tale-bearing to be vastly conducive to the practice of benevolence—Johnson's criticism upon Frederick the Great's writings, 'such as you may suppose Voltaire's foot-boy ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... had been suffered to drop, but that she continued present to his thoughts was sufficiently indicated by the souvenirs he collected specially for her: the views of the scenes he visited, the Alpenrosen he gathered for her in its native home, Voltaire's autograph. ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... que disoit Voltaire a l'article de Le Sage, dans la premiere edition du Siecle de ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... heculean labor: That a man must have explored every sphere of social life, to become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as the novel is the private history of nations: That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne, Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the Thousand and One Nights, were all men of genius as ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... going through 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. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... same audience that earlier in the day had whiled away the time by witnessing the ever-recurrent dramas of the Place de la Revolution assembled here in the evenings and filled stalls, boxes, and tiers, laughing over the satires of Voltaire or weeping over the sentimental tragedies of persecuted Romeos and ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... struck with a mallet and not the man's hand. And it was for the blow that Torrigiano had to flee, and seemingly, with the years, he had gotten it into his head that he left Florence of his own accord, and his crime was a thing of which to boast. Voltaire once said that beyond doubt the soldier who thrust the spear into the side of the Savior went away and boasted of the deed. Torrigiano's name is forever linked with that of Michelangelo. Thus much for the pride of little men who make a virtue of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... 'ghost' of wit, the king troubled himself very little. He had an especial admiration for breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length, for the sake of it. Over-niceties wearied him. He would have preferred Rabelais' 'Gargantua' to the 'Zadig' of Voltaire: and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... vestments and architecture, also producing religious ecstacy by physical expedients, such as fasts and vigils, in which case he is denounced as a Ritualist. Or he may be either a Unitarian Deist like Voltaire or Tom Paine, or the more modern sort of Anglican Theosophist to whom the Holy Ghost is the Elan Vital of Bergson, and the Father and Son are an expression of the fact that our functions and aspects are manifold, and that we are all sons and all either potential or ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... on account of these novel aspirations of his. In the present day he would have had his motor car and his house on Hindhead, a seat in Parliament and a brief from the Nation to boot as a Member for Humanity. Voltaire was the only figure in the eighteenth century even to approach such a flattering position, and he was for many years a refugee from his own land. Smollett was energetic and ambitious enough to start in rather a grand way, with a large ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them. Newton had astonished perhaps forty or fifty men in Europe, for not more than that number probably at any one time had read him and understood him, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... Catholicism and feudalism in their various stages of splendor and decay—the France of crusade and chivalry, of St. Louis and Bayard. On the hither side are freethought, industry, and centralization—the France of Voltaire, Turgot, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... played the chief part in his early development. He 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 care ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back. Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action; the same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him. There is a natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... the most to produce the French revolution, the tyranny of the government, the excesses of the higher orders, or the writings of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau? Rowton, p. ...
— Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Debate Index - Second Edition • Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
... made not long since of Voltaire, which the sculptor, not having that respect for the prejudices of mankind which he ought to have, has made entirely naked, and as meagre and emaciated as the original is said to be. The consequence is what might be expected; it has remained in the sculptor's ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... 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
... line, at once earning a somewhat toughly-woven livelihood, and perfecting his talent with the pencil. In later years, the force and freedom of this talent were witnessed to by illustrations of a more important character in a magnificent edition of Voltaire's Henriade, published in 1825, and of the well known Life ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... using the information—a practice not inconsistent in such a biographer. For instance, when he assumes, that in the portrait of Beattie, the figures of Scepticism, Sophistry, and Infidelity, represent Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon; remarking, that they have survived the "insult of Reynolds." An enquiry from Northcote ought to have led him to conclude otherwise, for Northcote, who had the best means of knowing, says, "Because one of those figures was a lean figure, (alluding to the subordinate ones ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... Voltaire, in his Century of Louis XIV., made his reflection on the Irish soldier out of his limited knowledge of the Williamite war in Ireland. He says, "The Irish, whom we have seen such good soldiers in France and Spain, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... up and takes the place of the one 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 fact themselves. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... their physical condition be so important as in a republic. The utmost attention was paid to the bodily training of Victoria, because she was to be a queen and the mother of kings. By the theory of our government, however imperfectly applied as yet, this is the precise position of every American girl. Voltaire said that the fate of nations had often depended on the gout of a prime-minister; and the fate of our institutions may hang on the precise temperament which our next President shall have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... parallel between the philosophies of Aristotle and Descartes, 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 he lived to the age of a hundred, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele |
