Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire is doing that classic Enlightenment move: dressing a ruthless aesthetic judgment in a crisp, almost throwaway epigram. "All styles are good" sounds generous, even pluralist, until the trapdoor opens on "except the tiresome kind". The line works because it refuses to argue on behalf of any one school; it simply declares boredom the only unforgivable sin. In one stroke, he sidesteps the pieties of taste and makes readerly attention the court of appeal.

The intent is polemical but sly. Voltaire spent his life fighting solemnity: the scholastic droners, the clerical rhetoricians, the self-important pedants who used complexity as a moat. "Tiresome" is a moral category here, not just a mood. To bore is to waste another person's finite time, to mistake your verbosity for their obligation. Underneath the lightness is a hard demand for clarity, velocity, and proportion.

Context matters: 18th-century France was a world of salons, pamphlets, and public disputation where style was social power. Wit could puncture authority faster than a treatise. Voltaire's own prose is engineered for circulation - portable, quotable, fast. This line is both a defense of stylistic freedom and a warning label. Write in any voice you want - ornate, plain, comic, philosophical - but if you can't keep the reader awake, you're not expressing depth; you're performing it.