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Voltaire is depicted on the left. The philosophers of the Lumières movement [Note 1] came with many different talents: Thomas Jefferson had had a legal education but was equally at home with archaeology and architecture; Benjamin Franklin had been a career diplomat and was a physicist. Condorcet wrote on subjects as wide-ranging as commerce ...
Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, and even scientific expositions. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. [7] Voltaire was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally.
1. “Better is the enemy of good.” 2. “I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.” 3. “Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will ...
According to Voltaire himself, the poem concerns and was written in honour of the life of Henry IV of France, and is a celebration of his life. [1] The ostensible subject is the siege of Paris in 1589 by Henry III in concert with Henry of Navarre, soon to be Henry IV , but its themes are the twin evils of religious fanaticism and civil discord.
Roy Porter argues that the reasons for this neglect were the assumptions that the movement was primarily French-inspired, that it was largely a-religious or anti-clerical, and that it stood in outspoken defiance to the established order. [103] Porter admits that after the 1720s England could claim thinkers to equal Diderot, Voltaire, or Rousseau.
Voltaire presents his readers with the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet along with a translation into French rhyming verse. He also cites a passage from John Dryden and gives a translation. In Letter 19, Voltaire addresses British comedy, citing William Wycherley, John Vanbrugh and William Congreve.
The Jesuit preacher Claude-Adrien Nonnotte spent much of his life opposing the view on Christianity that Voltaire had taken in the Essai. At first, he anonymously published Examen critique ou Réfutation du livre des moeurs ("Critical examination or refutation of the book of customs"). Over the next twenty years, he wrote a succession of ...
Voltaire had this correspondence published in every future edition of the play, which aided its publicity. [9] Napoleon, during his captivity on Saint Helena, criticised Voltaire's Mahomet, and said Voltaire had made him merely an impostor and a tyrant, without representing him as a "great man": Mahomet was the subject of deep criticism ...