Philosophy of History Quotes

“the most noble truths have but few sectaries; the greatest men die without honor.”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“This error gains credit at the end of two or three centuries; it afterwards becomes sacred,”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“Greece, we know, was the country of fables, and almost every fable was the origin of a doctrine, of a temple, and a public feast.”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“The world is stocked with men faster than a warren is with rabbits.”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“the reason why the Greeks are so new a people. These great revolutions sunk them once more in barbarity, at the time that the nations of Asia and Egypt were flourishing.”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“a nation whose first chronicles attest the existence of a vast empire, powerful and wise, must have been assembled as a body of people for antecedent ages.”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“all trace things back to their origin and the formation of the world. The Chinese have not been guilty of this folly; their history comprehends no other than historical times.”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“Our travelling missionaries candidly relate, that when they spoke to the wife emperor Camhi, of the chronology of the Vulgate, of the Septuagint, and the Samaritan, Camhi replied to them, is it possible that the books you believe in are at variance?”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“Other nations invented allegorical fables, and the Chinese wrote their history with the pen and the astrolabe in their hand,”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History

“If any annals carry with them the stamp of certainty, they are those of China, which have united, as has been already said, the history of heaven with that of earth.”
― Voltaire, The Philosophy of History