Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire’s line is a miniature act of Enlightenment mischief: a toast that turns into an insult before the glass is even set down. “Froth” and “dregs” are tasting notes, but they’re really social notes. The world, like a poorly poured drink, is full of surface foam (the loud, self-important, over-aerated) and sediment (the stagnating, the brutalized, the ignored). Yet he carves out a narrow band of “excellent” in the middle, and that adjective lands with a cool, calibrated cruelty. He’s not praising humanity so much as grading it.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, it’s an argument for moderation: the best portion is neither the bubbly excess of those intoxicated by power and fashion nor the bitter residue of those trapped in deprivation and resentment. On the other, it’s Voltaire’s favorite maneuver - a worldly shrug dressed as wisdom. He knows the categories are unfair, then uses them anyway because satire needs friction. The “middle” becomes a moral refuge and a social claim: the reasonable, educated, productive class that can read, argue, and improve things without succumbing to fanaticism.

Context matters: Voltaire lived through a Europe of rigid estates, church authority, and periodic hysteria, where extremes weren’t just personality types but political realities. The froth is court culture and clerical bombast; the dregs are the suffering masses treated as unavoidable waste. By declaring the middle “excellent,” he flatters the bourgeois engine of Enlightenment reform while quietly admitting its blind spot: you can praise balance and still accept that someone else is stuck at the bottom of the glass.