Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire’s line flatters the reader while quietly smuggling in a provocation: admiration is not purely selfless. “Appreciation” gets dressed up as a moral sentiment, but he pivots fast to ownership. When he writes that it “makes what is excellent in others belong to us,” he’s describing a kind of civilized appropriation - the Enlightenment version of theft, done with manners and a clear conscience.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s a rebuke to envy, the petty reflex Voltaire spent a career skewering in salons and pamphlets. If someone else’s brilliance makes you feel smaller, you’ve chosen the wrong emotion. Appreciation is the smarter technology: it converts another person’s excellence into personal enrichment without requiring you to diminish them. It’s social alchemy for a world where status is currency.

The subtext, though, is classic Voltairean realism about the self. We like to imagine admiration as disinterested; Voltaire suggests it “works” because it benefits us. The sentence’s little legalistic verb - “belong” - implies a transfer of property. Culture, in this view, is shared wealth not through generosity alone but through recognition, imitation, and the quiet internalization of what we praise.

Context matters: Voltaire lived amid patronage, rivalry, and the precarious politics of reputation. For an 18th-century writer navigating courts and censors, the ability to praise well wasn’t just etiquette; it was survival. He turns that social skill into a philosophy: the enlightened person collects excellence the way others collect enemies.