Voltaire
1694–1778 · France
“We must cultivate our garden.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Voltaire
Drew From(2)
who shaped Voltaire
- Candide is Swift's invention turned on philosophy — the wide-eyed traveler whose globe-trotting unmasks a fashionable creed, here Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds"
- Voltaire read Gulliver's Travels on its first publication and praised Swift as "the Rabelais of England"; the form runs straight into his tales (the Big-Endian quarrel resurfaces in Zadig)
- Read Swift first and you'll see the machine Voltaire inherited — then sharpened to a blade
- Candide's famous last word — "cultivate our garden" — is the Epicurean ideal, the retreat to tending what's in front of you, transmitted down through Lucretius
- Voltaire prized On the Nature of Things and leaned on it in his quarrels with the Church
- Lucretius is the quiet philosophy underneath Voltaire's satire; reading him first names the garden Candide finally chooses
Inspired(1)
who Voltaire shaped
- Flaubert read Candide something like a hundred times and counted it among his "sacred books" — Voltaire's anatomy of human folly is the engine he carried into his own realism
- A Sentimental Education takes Voltaire's frantic, episodic catalogue of bêtise and slows it to the pace of one disenchanted life
- Watch what Flaubert does to the famous ending: Voltaire's brisk "cultivate your garden" curdles into Frédéric's resigned cultivation of lost memories
Famous Quotes
“In this best of all possible worlds, all is for the best.”
“All that is very well, but let us cultivate our garden.”
“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”
“It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end.”
About Voltaire
French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher, one of the most influential thinkers in Western history. His satirical novella Candide is a masterpiece of philosophical wit. A prolific writer of plays, poetry, histories, and polemics, he championed civil liberties, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state.