Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire’s line lands like a compliment, but it’s sharpened with the kind of courtly mischief he specialized in: a neat little reversal that flatters women while needling men’s pretensions to rational mastery. “All the reasonings of men” conjures the Enlightenment’s favorite self-portrait - the male philosopher, the pamphleteer, the system-builder - then dismisses it as inferior to a single “sentiment.” The move is witty because it doesn’t argue; it performs the very thing it exalts. A cool syllogism gets outpunched by an emotional blow.

The subtext is more complicated than proto-feminism. Voltaire isn’t handing women the keys to the Republic of Letters so much as relocating them to a different pedestal: men think, women feel. That sounds like praise, but it keeps the gender map intact. “Sentiment” in the 18th century isn’t just raw emotion; it’s moral perception, taste, the quick human judgment that salons prized. Voltaire knew those salons were often run by women who could make or break reputations. In that world, a devastating aphorism is also social strategy: it courts the arbiters of fashionable opinion while mocking the solemnity of male “reasonings” that too often served power, dogma, or vanity.

Context matters because Voltaire’s broader project was to puncture certainty - religious, political, philosophical - and this sentence is a miniature of that campaign. He’s not simply choosing women over men; he’s choosing the immediacy of lived human response over the pomp of abstract argument. It’s a flirtation with feeling as a weapon against arrogance, even if the flirtation comes with a cage built into the compliment.