Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire is doing what he does best: using taste as a weapon. On the surface, he is offering a tidy rule of style - flowers for ceremonies, steel for serious work. Underneath, he is indicting a whole ecosystem that hid behind eloquence to avoid accountability. In courtrooms, pulpits, and textbooks, the stakes are real: property, salvation, knowledge. So when language turns ornamental there, it is not merely tacky; it becomes ethically suspect, a kind of perfumed fog.

The jab lands because Voltaire treats rhetoric as a moral technology. “Public speeches” that are “only” compliment are dismissed as social theater: harmless precisely because they do not claim to change minds or govern lives. The phrase “when there is nothing more solid to say” is the dagger. Flowery style is framed not as a legitimate aesthetic choice but as a symptom: emptiness dressed up as intelligence. That’s a devastating diagnosis in an era when church sermons and legal pleading routinely relied on grandiloquence to command deference.

The context is the Enlightenment’s campaign against inherited authority. Voltaire is arguing for prose that behaves like evidence: clear, pointed, answerable. He’s also policing the boundary between persuasion and seduction. In a pleading or a sermon, metaphor can become manipulation, beauty a bribe. Banishing the “flowery” isn’t prudishness; it’s a demand that institutions stop confusing being moved with being told the truth.