Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

“Business is the salt of life” is Voltaire at his most deceptively brisk: a domestic metaphor that smuggles in a whole Enlightenment worldview. Salt doesn’t replace food; it sharpens it. Voltaire isn’t praising profit for its own sake so much as arguing that commerce - the daily churn of making, selling, negotiating - seasons existence with urgency and texture. Without it, life goes bland: not tragic, just flabby, under-stimulated, ripe for superstition or idle aristocratic posturing.

The intent has an edge. Voltaire watched a France where inherited rank often passed for virtue, and where religious authority could still police thought. “Business” becomes a quiet counter-authority: a secular discipline that rewards competence, punishes fantasy, and forces people to deal with one another across class lines. It’s a sly brief for modernity. Trade makes strangers mutually legible. It turns dogma into bad customer service.

Subtext: work is a moral technology. Not the puritan sanctification of toil, but a pragmatic check on human vanity. Voltaire’s “business” is movement - letters, deals, projects, schemes - the antidote to the boredom that breeds persecution. There’s also an implicit jab at the salon intellectual who luxuriates in ideas but never risks them in the marketplace.

Context matters: Voltaire admired England’s comparatively vigorous commercial culture and its links to relative toleration. In that light, salt is also preservative. Business doesn’t just flavor life; it keeps society from spoiling into tyranny and stagnation.