"It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it"
About this Quote
Voltaire isn’t giving art advice so much as issuing a provocation to his own century’s self-satisfied rationalists. The Enlightenment loved the cool machinery of perception: observe clearly, judge correctly, catalogue the world. Voltaire, master of the raised eyebrow, twists the knife. Seeing and knowing are “not sufficient” because they can become a way of staying clean - of treating beauty like a specimen under glass. His line smuggles in a demand that the mind alone can’t meet: art has to do something to you.
The phrasing is calibrated. “We must” turns aesthetic experience into an obligation, almost a civic duty. And “feel and be affected” is pointedly passive in the second half. Feeling can be performed; being affected implies surrender, the ego admitting it’s porous. Voltaire, famous for skewering hypocrisy, is warning against the polished connoisseurship that praises masterpieces while remaining emotionally untouched - taste as status, not encounter.
Context matters: 18th-century Europe is building salons, academies, and hierarchies of refinement. Voltaire flourished in those spaces, but he also saw how quickly “good taste” could become a substitute for moral seriousness. Under the surface, this is an argument about empathy and consequence. If beauty doesn’t move you, it won’t change you; if it won’t change you, it’s just another ornament of privilege. The line lands because it refuses to let appreciation be purely intellectual - it insists art is an event, not a verdict.
The phrasing is calibrated. “We must” turns aesthetic experience into an obligation, almost a civic duty. And “feel and be affected” is pointedly passive in the second half. Feeling can be performed; being affected implies surrender, the ego admitting it’s porous. Voltaire, famous for skewering hypocrisy, is warning against the polished connoisseurship that praises masterpieces while remaining emotionally untouched - taste as status, not encounter.
Context matters: 18th-century Europe is building salons, academies, and hierarchies of refinement. Voltaire flourished in those spaces, but he also saw how quickly “good taste” could become a substitute for moral seriousness. Under the surface, this is an argument about empathy and consequence. If beauty doesn’t move you, it won’t change you; if it won’t change you, it’s just another ornament of privilege. The line lands because it refuses to let appreciation be purely intellectual - it insists art is an event, not a verdict.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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