"Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another"
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Voltaire punctures the romantic fantasy of the solitary genius with a needle he loved to use: clarity sharpened into provocation. “Originality” gets demoted from mystical spark to craft practice. The key word is “judicious.” He’s not praising plagiarism; he’s praising taste. The writer’s job isn’t to avoid influence, it’s to curate it - to steal well, from the right ancestors, at the right moment, and with enough transformation that the borrowing becomes a new instrument.
The subtext is a rebuke to literary vanity. Voltaire is writing in a world where reputations were built through salons, pamphlet wars, and a constant recycling of classical forms. Enlightenment culture prized reason, polish, and conversation across texts; originality wasn’t a withdrawal from tradition but an argument within it. So “borrowed one from another” reads less like scandal than like a map of how ideas move: influence as a chain of relay handoffs, not a series of immaculate conceptions.
There’s also a sly defense mechanism here. Voltaire, who adapted English thinkers, classical models, and contemporary rivals, is normalizing the very methods his critics might call derivative. He reframes borrowing as intellectual hygiene: don’t pretend you invented the wheel, improve it. In an era anxious about authority - religious, political, aesthetic - the line advances an Enlightenment ethos: progress comes from remixing inherited materials with judgment, not from claiming purity.
The subtext is a rebuke to literary vanity. Voltaire is writing in a world where reputations were built through salons, pamphlet wars, and a constant recycling of classical forms. Enlightenment culture prized reason, polish, and conversation across texts; originality wasn’t a withdrawal from tradition but an argument within it. So “borrowed one from another” reads less like scandal than like a map of how ideas move: influence as a chain of relay handoffs, not a series of immaculate conceptions.
There’s also a sly defense mechanism here. Voltaire, who adapted English thinkers, classical models, and contemporary rivals, is normalizing the very methods his critics might call derivative. He reframes borrowing as intellectual hygiene: don’t pretend you invented the wheel, improve it. In an era anxious about authority - religious, political, aesthetic - the line advances an Enlightenment ethos: progress comes from remixing inherited materials with judgment, not from claiming purity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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