Voltaire Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Voltaire with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
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“What is toleration? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies—it is the first law of nature.”
Meaning & context
Voltaire begins toleration from shared human fallibility: recognizing that everyone is capable of error weakens the claim that disagreement should be answered with persecution.
Source details
A Philosophical Dictionary, article ‘Toleration,’ Section I, Project Gutenberg #35630. Voltaire opens the section by calling toleration an attribute of humanity and urging mutual pardon for human weakness and error, then turns immediately to religious communities trading together without violence. This remains an Enlightenment polemic against religious persecution rather than a modern legal definition or universal empirical law.
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“that we must cultivate our garden.”
Meaning & context
Candide turns away from endless abstract explanation toward concrete shared work, making the garden a practical answer to the suffering and argument that have filled the story.
Source details
Candide, Chapter XXX, Project Gutenberg #19942, uncredited public-domain English translation. Candide says “that we must cultivate our garden” to Pangloss and Martin near the tale’s close after reflecting on the old Turk’s life of work. This is translated fictional dialogue and literary resolution, not Voltaire autobiography or a literal guarantee that work resolves every hardship.
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“As trade enriched the citizens in England, so it contributed to their freedom, and this freedom on the other side extended their commerce, whence arose the grandeur of the State.”
Meaning & context
Voltaire argues that commercial wealth and political freedom reinforced one another in the England he was describing, connecting economic activity with civic power.
Source details
Letters on England, Letter X, “On Trade,” Project Gutenberg #2445, transcribed from the 1894 Cassell & Co. edition. Voltaire argues that English trade contributed to civic freedom and that freedom in turn extended commerce. The sentence is preserved as an eighteenth-century translated historical and political-economic argument, not a universal economic law or current empirical finding.
