Quotes · Skopia

55 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Genre·Satire✕clear

Novel · Satire

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Candide · 1759

★ 7.6

Novel · Satire

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

Candide · 1759

★ 7.4

Novel · Satire

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

Candide · 1759

★ 7.0

Great wits are sure to madness near allied And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Absalom and Achitophel · 1681

★ 6.9

For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might? Nor is the people's judgement always true: The most may err as grossly as the few.

Absalom and Achitophel · 1681

★ 6.9

Novel · Satirical fiction · Satire

Speak the truth and shame the Devil.

Francois Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel · 1564

★ 5.5

Satire · Travel writing

Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent as when they are at stool.

Gulliver's Travels · 1726

★ 5.5

Essay · Satire

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting · 1745

★ 5.5

Satire · Travel writing

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.

Gulliver's Travels · 1726

★ 5.4

Novel · Satire

What is Love?... It is the morning and the evening star.

1927

★ 5.4

Satire · Political literature

They wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is.

Utopia · 1516

★ 5.3

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

George Bernard Shaw

Plays Unpleasant · 1898

★ 5.3

Novel · Satirical fiction · Satire

To laugh is proper to man.

Francois Rabelais

Gargantua and Pantagruel · 1534

★ 4.7

Satire · Political literature

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.

Utopia · 1516

★ 4.5

Satire · Travel writing

I said there was a society of men among us bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves.

Gulliver's Travels · 1726

★ 4.5

Novel · Satire

We must cultivate our garden.

Candide · 1759

★ 3.9

Novel · Satire

Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.

Candide · 1759

★ 3.9

All wish to be learned, but no one is willing to pay the price.

Satires · 100

★ 3.8

Essay · Satire

Every man desires to live long; but no man would be old.

1727

★ 3.8

There’s none so blind as they that won’t see.

1738

★ 3.8

Show 20 more of 55 (21–40)