Entries from Come Sit a While that draw on the words of Voltaire.
François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778) — who wrote under the pen name Voltaire — was one of the most dangerous minds in Europe, which is why so many kings tried to silence him. Born in Paris to a middle-class family, he was brilliant from childhood and insufferable about it, which got him expelled from school circles, imprisoned in the Bastille, and eventually exiled to England. That exile changed him. He returned to France carrying English ideas about religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and the limits of authority — ideas that would help ignite the French Revolution, though he did not live to see it. He wrote plays, poems, history, novels, and tens of thousands of letters. He satirized kings, bishops, and philosophers with equal enthusiasm. His most famous work, Candide, skewered the fashionable optimism of his day with such ferocious wit that it was immediately banned in Geneva, Paris, and Rome, which ensured that everyone read it. He was not a religious man in any orthodox sense. He was something harder to categorize: a man who believed deeply in reason and was honest enough to acknowledge reason’s edges. He lived to the age of eighty-three, working almost until his last breath — reading, writing, arguing, revising. The man who said he was certain of nothing spent his life certain about this: that the examined mind, the questioning spirit, the refusal to stop learning — these were the highest human obligations. He earned the right to that opinion by spending eighty-three years in pursuit of it.
Entries featuring Voltaire
- The Edge of What We Know (2026-06-04)
Drawn from 1 entries · refreshed July 24, 2026