The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Age of Enlightenment14 quotes
If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others? — Voltaire · 1759I 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? — Voltaire · 1759Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need. — Voltaire · 1759She blushed and so did he. She greeted him in a faltering voice, and he spoke to her without knowing what he was saying. — Voltaire · 1759Example is always more efficacious than precept. — Samuel Johnson · 1759All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; for, after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunégonde, if you hadn’t been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. — Voltaire · 1759All 14 quotes →Spanish Golden Age11 quotes
I was so free with him as not to mince the matter. — Miguel de Cervantes · 1605Can we ever have too much of a good thing? — Miguel de Cervantes · 1605You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch in his throne. — Miguel de Cervantes · 1605That's the nature of women... Not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not. — Miguel de Cervantes · 1605He's a muddle-headed fool, with frequent lucid intervals. — Miguel de Cervantes · 1615Blessed be he that invented sleep. — Miguel de Cervantes · 1615All 11 quotes →The Renaissance5 quotes
Speak the truth and shame the Devil. — Francois Rabelais · 1564To laugh is proper to man. — Francois Rabelais · 1534Shallow brooks murmur most, deep silent slide away. — Philip Sidney · 1593Appetite comes with eating. — Francois Rabelais · 1534Who shoots at the mid-day sun, though he be sure he shall never hit the mark; yet as sure he is he shall shoot higher than who aims but at a bush. — Philip Sidney · 1593Classical antiquity3 quotes
One good turn deserves another. — Gaius Petronius · 66Beauty and wisdom are rarely conjoined. — Gaius Petronius · 66A man who is always ready to believe what is told him will never do well. — Gaius Petronius · 66