“Man ought to be content, it is said; but with what?”

— Voltaire

L'homme doit être content, dit-on; mais de quoi? <br class="br">Pensées, Remarques, et Observations de Voltaire; ouvrage posthume (1802) <br class="br">This is from a volume of posthumously published "Thoughts, remarks and observations" believed to be by Voltaire. http://www.voltaire-integral.com/Html/31/04_Pensees.html <br class="br">Citas

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Voltaire167

French writer, historian, and philosopher 1694–1778

William Paton Mackay (1839–1885) Scottish clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 375.

“He was a man who looked at what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a man's acts.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

I, 16
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book I

“What a man does in his closet ought not to affect the rights of third persons.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Outram v. Morewood (1793), 5 T. R. 123.

“Toleration in religion was one of the great rights of man, and a man ought never to be deprived of what was his natural right.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (19 April 1791), quoted in J. Wright (ed.), The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox in the House of Commons. Volume IV (1815), p. 192.
1790s

“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Wit and Humour"
Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)

“What are the Qualifications of a Secretary of State? He ought to be a Man of universal Reading in Laws, Governments, History. Our whole terrestrial Universe ought to be summarily comprehended in his Mind.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

As quoted in Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams with Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784–1822 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015026646540;view=1up;seq=69 (1927), edited by Worthington C. Ford, Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, and Company. p. 57 <br class="br">Attributed

“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as "a tree as it ought to be."”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 332 (Notebook W II 3. November 1887 - March 1888, KGW VIII, 2.304, KSA 13.62)
The Will to Power (1888)

“Man is never perfect, nor contented.”

Jules Verne book The Mysterious Island

L’homme n’est jamais ni parfait, ni content.
Source: The Mysterious Island (1874), Part I, ch. XXII

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

July 14, 1763, p. 121
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol 2

“There are two things that kill a genius — a fatal disease and contentment. When a man is contented he goes to sleep. Voltaire had no chance to be contented, and so he wrote eternally and unceasingly, more than any other man in the history of the world.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

“Man ought to be content, it is said; but with what?”

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