Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
VoltaireRead
Will is wish, and liberty is power.
Interpretation
True desire is rooted in freedom and the capability to act on one's wishes.
Voltaire's quote suggests that willpower, or the capacity to desire and wish for something, is intricately linked to the notion of liberty, or freedom. Without the freedom to act upon our will, our wishes remain unfulfilled, thus underscoring the importance of personal autonomy and the power that comes with it in achieving one's desires.
In practice
A motivational speaker could reference this quote to inspire personal empowerment.
Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.
It is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice. For they cannot live in any country where virtue and knowledge prevail. The religion and public liberty of a people are intimately connected; their interests are interwoven, they cannot subsist separately; and therefore they rise and fall together. For this reason, it is always observable, that those who are combin'd to destroy the people's liberties, practice every art to poison their morals.
If I want to be free from any other man's dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.
But Nature cast me for the part she found me best fitted for, and I have had to play it, and must play it till the curtain falls.
God's word is always effective and produces whatever it expresses. My words, on the contrary, cannot create anything; I can only change what already is into something else.
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