10 quotes
There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
It is by character and not by intellect the world is won.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
He who has lost only those of whose faith and truth he is sure, has not yet reached the depth of human desolation.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the Platonists is in love with a third person.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
For the first time he looked into his heart and wrote, and thus for the first time he touched the hearts of others; the cold style took fire, and beneath the clumsy periods welled tears.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
'What a fuss about an omelette!' he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," was his attitude now.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man. But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the Immortals.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was 'the compulsory instrument of great evil,' he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could — what a different world!
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)
It is as the father of the Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation.
The Friends of Voltaire (1906)