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Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

La satire ment sur les gens de lettres pendant leur vie, et l'éloge ment après leur mort.

Original text (French)

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More quotes by Voltaire

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

It is very strange that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (1764)

We have never intended to enlighten shoemakers and servants—this is up to apostles.

Whoe'er thou art, thy master see;
He was—or is—or is to be.

Elements, animals, humans, everything is at war.

Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756)

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Wit's an unruly engine, wildly striking
Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer.

George Herbert The Temple (1633)

A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary.

Horace Walpole

The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel– a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

Horace Walpole

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth The Harper Book of Quotations (1993)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Voltaire (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.