Parenting & Family Quote by Voltaire

Youth, in Voltaire's hands, is less a season of innocence than a trapdoor: step wrong and the floor drops out for the rest of your life. The line sounds paternal, even tender ("my son"), but that intimacy is doing tactical work. Voltaire slips a hard lesson into the mouth of authority, then lets the reader feel the chill behind it: society pretends your future is an open road, yet it is arranged like a corridor with one locked door after another.

The sentence is engineered like a moral syllogism. "The first step" implies choice, agency, the romance of beginnings. Then comes the pivot: that single move "depends" the rest of our days. Voltaire compresses a whole social order into a verb. Your first job, first patron, first marriage, first public stance - these aren't merely personal milestones; in an ancien regime obsessed with rank, reputation, and gatekeeping, they are assignments. Opportunity is path-dependent. One misread room, one bad sponsor, and you don't just lose a moment; you lose your trajectory.

The subtext is Voltaire's quiet indictment of a world that punishes learning in public. Enlightenment talk loved "progress", but progress, for most people, was conditional - on class, connections, and the fragile theater of respectability. Read cynically, it's not advice to be bold; it's advice to survive. Read politically, it's a critique of systems that demand you get it right immediately, then call the outcome merit.