The Age of Voltaire: The Story of Civilization, Volume IX

by Will Durant

Shares were bargained for in taverns, coffeehouses, and milliners’ shops; each night men and women calculated how rich they had become, and how much richer they might be if they had bought sooner or more.

A German jurist thought that the increase in northern Europe was largely due to the transfer of monks and nuns from celibacy to parentage by the Protestant Reformation, and urged that “a statue be erected to Luther as the preserver of the species”;36 but we must not exaggerate the continence of medieval monks.

Marriages were entered upon in heat, and broken in thaw;

“Everybody in this society,” Congreve had written in 1700, “was born with budding antlers”;

“a nation lighted up at both ends must soon be consumed.”

“don’t talk to me about books. The only books I know are men and cards.”

The Earl of Chesterfield, who loved the town, would doubtless have applied to its elite the description that he gave of all courts, as places where “you must expect to meet with connections without friendship, enmities without hatred, honor without virtue, appearances saved and realities sacrificed; good manners with bad morals; and all vice and virtues so disguised that whoever has only reasoned upon both would know neither when he first met them at court.”

The high birth rate favored by the Catholic Church, as her secret weapon against all opposition, soon countervailed the depredations of famine, pestilence, and war;

In the long run the faith and fertility of the oppressed overcame the arms and greed of the conquerors.

Ambition was the mast of his character and the wind in his sails;

he appropriated the ethic of governments—that all is good that advantages the state; if he used deception, calumny, intimidation, intrigue, ingratitude, perjury, treachery, these were tools of the statesman’s trade, and were to be judged not by preachers but by kings.

All things flow, and certainty is a dream.

He knows as well as we do that certainty is not necessary for life, nor for religion, nor even for science; that a high degree of probability suffices for crossing a street or building a cathedral, or saving our souls.

“We tend to give the name of virtue to any quality in others that gives us pleasure by making for our advantage, and to give the name of vice to any human quality that gives us pain.”

It is strange … that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange … that men should lie in all ages.

“Ultimately the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than the life of an oyster.”

He maliciously suggests that the world was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; … or it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and, ever since his death, has run on at adventure, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.

In these monotheistic creeds—Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism—merit and “salvation” were more and more divorced from virtue and attached to ritual observance and unquestioning belief.

In consequence educated persons became either martyrs or hypocrites; and as they rarely chose martyrdom, the life of man was tarnished with lip service and insincerity.

Did ever one make it a point of honor to speak the truth to children or madmen? … The ecclesiastical profession only adds a little more to our innocent dissimulation, or rather simulation, without which it is impossible to pass through the world.

He was quite insensitive to the consolations of faith, the comfort it brought to souls shivering in the immensity of mystery, or the loneliness of grief, or the harsh fatality of defeat. The success of Wesley was history’s answer to Hume.

Diarrhea, the favorite vengeance of the gods upon the human great,

He returned to Edinburgh July 4, 1776, prepared to die “as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.”

“He was an atheist.” Another answered, “No matter, he was an honest man.”162

This poverty was due not so much to the tightness of booksellers and the indifference of Walpole as to the unprecedented glutting of the literary market by mediocre talents underselling one another. The predominance of failures over successes in the “word business” shared with the divorce of literature from aristocratic patronage in debasing the social status of authors.

Pope challenged the prejudices of his time by claiming to be both a poet and a gentleman. By the latter word he meant a man of “gentle birth,” not a man of gentle ways. On the contrary!

Johnson, who despised biographies that begin with a pedigree and end with a funeral,

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.4

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring5

Having leisure to file his verse, he readily accepted the classic counsel to perfect the form, to make the goblet more precious than its wine.

literature should be reason aptly dressed.

Nature yes, but nature tamed by man; feeling yes, but chasten...

“A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”

“a tree,” he said, “is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation robes.”

He described himself as “a lively little creature, with long legs and arms; a spider is no ill emblem of him; he has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.”

Lord Bathurst said of him that he had headaches four days a week, and was sick the other three.

Was he a genius? Of course: not in thought, which he borrowed, but in form, which he perfected in his genre.

Only his hatreds gave him wings.

“Gray has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tiptoe.… I confess that I contemplate his poetry with less satisfaction than his life.”

fig leaves are as necessary for our minds as our bodies, and ’tis as indecent to show all we think as all we have.

Richardson was so intent on preaching that he allowed some flaws into his literary art.

He knew the body of his country’s life better than its soul, and the body of love better than its spirit; the more delicate and subtle elements of the English character escaped him. Even so, he left his mark upon Smollett, Sterne, Dickens, and Thackeray; he was the father of them all.

So he described Sir Charles Knowles as “an admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer without resolution, and a man without veracity.”

He compared the English with their beer: froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, but the middle excellent88

“a nation fond of their liberty, learned, witty, despising life and death, a nation of philosophers.”

“Every year,” said de Tocqueville, “the inequality of taxation separated classes, … sparing the rich and burdening the poor.”

“Sire, my clergy’s vices are their own; mine come from my ancestry.”

“We will never consent that that which has heretofore been the gift of our love and respect should become the tribute of our obedience.”

The power of the Church rested ultimately on the success of the parish priest.

Monks, friars, and nuns were diminishing in number and growing in virtue26 and wealth.