Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire is praising poetry with the kind of backhanded elegance he perfected: a compliment that doubles as a jab at everything that talks too much. “Few persons will deny” is doing sly work here. It pretends to appeal to consensus while quietly mocking the reader who might object. In an Enlightenment culture addicted to pamphlets, treatises, sermons, and legalistic rhetoric, Voltaire elevates compression as a moral and intellectual virtue. If prose is where people argue, justify, and evade, poetry is where language gets cornered into telling the truth faster.

The line also smuggles in a theory of power. “More” isn’t just information; it’s resonance, implication, aftertaste. Poetry wins by making meaning partly unsaid, forcing the reader to collaborate. Prose can bulldoze; poetry can insinuate. That’s why the “fewer words” matter: scarcity sharpens attention, turns each word into a pressure point. Voltaire, a writer who fought censorship and the orthodoxies of church and state, understood that what can’t be stated plainly can still be transmitted through rhythm, metaphor, and indirection. Brevity is not just style, it’s strategy.

There’s irony, too, because Voltaire himself was a master of prose that moves like a rapier. His endorsement of poetry reads like a dare to prose writers: stop hiding behind sprawl. Say it cleanly, or admit you don’t know what you mean. In that sense, the merit of poetry becomes an indictment of the culture’s favorite vice: verbosity masquerading as depth.