Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire isn’t taking a humble swipe at superstition here; he’s throwing a brick through the window of “mystery” as an alibi. “Chance” gets treated like a real force - a convenient label that lets people stop thinking, stop investigating, stop assigning responsibility. By calling it “void of sense,” he’s not denying randomness as a lived experience so much as denying it as an explanation. In Enlightenment terms, “chance” is what you say when you’ve run out of curiosity.

The line works because it sounds like common sense while smuggling in a worldview. Voltaire’s target is the intellectual laziness that props up both religious fatalism and political complacency. If events can be waved away as accidental, then institutions don’t have to justify themselves, and cruelty can masquerade as inevitability. His insistence on cause is an ethical posture as much as a philosophical one: track the chain of reasons, and you can name the human decisions hiding inside “acts of God.”

Context matters. Voltaire lived through an era when disasters like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake weren’t just tragedies; they were ideological battlegrounds. Was catastrophe divine punishment, random chaos, or the natural outcome of physical laws and human choices (like building a city a certain way)? He’s pressing for a universe governed by intelligible mechanisms, because intelligibility is the precondition for reform. If nothing is “just chance,” then everything is, at least in principle, debuggable - by science, by policy, by courage.

There’s irony, too: he’s allergic to metaphysical fog, but he knows how seductive it is. That’s why he goes for the word itself. Rename it, and you change what people tolerate.