Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire turns suffering into a timing problem. “Life is thickly sown with thorns” concedes pain as the default terrain, not a shocking exception; the twist is his “remedy”: speed. That choice of verb matters. He doesn’t promise to remove the thorns, transcend them, or ennoble them. He offers an Enlightenment pragmatism that’s almost cold-blooded: momentum as medicine.

The subtext is a jab at the era’s preferred consolations. Where religion often dignified misfortune as meaningful trial, Voltaire’s sentence treats it as something more banal and dangerous: a mental infection that spreads when you keep touching it. “The longer we dwell” is an indictment of rumination, self-dramatization, and the social performance of grievance. He’s not denying injustice; he’s warning that misery has a secondary life inside the mind, where it compounds interest. This is the writer who survived censorship, exile, and the arbitrary cruelties of power; he understands that the world can hurt you twice, first with events, then with the stories you tell yourself about them.

The quote also smuggles in a politics. If institutions won’t protect you from thorns, you cultivate agency where you can: attention, pace, choice. It’s Voltaire’s skepticism in miniature - not optimistic, not despairing, allergic to metaphysical comfort. Pain is real; its authority is negotiable. Move fast, not because trauma is trivial, but because it’s persuasive.