Let us meet four times a year in a grand temple with music, and thank God for all his gifts. There is one sun. There is one God. Let us have one religion. Then all mankind will be brethren.
Providence has given us hope and sleep as a compensation for the many cares of life.
The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.
Every beauty, when out of it’s place, is a beauty no longer.
Those who think are excessively few; and those few do not set themselves to disturb the world.
What can I hope when all is right?
He who seeks truth should be of no country.
If there are atheists, who is to be blamed if not the mercenary tyrants of souls who, in revolting us against their swindles, compel some feeble spirits to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?
Heaven made virtue; man, the appearance.
I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.
The most genuine and efficacious charity is that which greases the paws of the priests; such charity covers a multitude of sins.
Happiness is not the portion of man.
Constant happiness is the philosopher’s stone of the soul.
The institution of religion exists only to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue. Everything in a religion which does not tend towards this goal must be considered foreign or dangerous.
Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature.
Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.
I read these words which are the sum of all moral philosophy, and which cut short all the disputes of the casuists: When in doubt if an action is good or bad, refrain.
There is only one morality, as there is only one geometry.
Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.
Meslier was the most singular phenomenon ever seen among all the meteors fatal to the Christian religion.