Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire’s moral advice lands like a raised eyebrow: the problem isn’t pleasure, it’s clumsiness. “Use, do not abuse” is the Enlightenment in miniature, a rebuke to two kinds of zealots who dominated his century - the ascetics who treated desire as sin, and the libertines who treated appetite as philosophy. The sentence is engineered to puncture both camps. By pairing “abstinence” with “excess,” Voltaire refuses the comforting story that virtue is just denial, or that freedom is just indulgence. Happiness, in his view, isn’t a medal you win by suffering or a prize you snatch by consuming; it’s a practice of proportion.

The subtext is political as much as personal. In ancien regime France, public morality was policed by Church authority, while aristocratic excess was often tolerated as a private entitlement. Voltaire, perpetually at war with hypocrisy, targets that double standard without preaching like a cleric. The balanced phrasing performs what it argues: restraint, clarity, a clean dismissal of fanaticism. Even the word “renders” matters - happiness isn’t discovered like a truth; it’s produced, almost crafted, by habits and judgment.

There’s also an implicit critique of puritanical revolutions of the soul. Voltaire distrusts any worldview that promises salvation through extremes, because extremes are easy to weaponize. Moderation here isn’t timidity; it’s a defense against moral absolutism, the kind that turns private choices into public cruelty.