The maxims and aphorisms of Voltaire that the reader has in his hands are an unpublished selection of the extensive correspondence that the French philosopher maintained throughout his life with his contemporaries. Many of the concerns of this sharp, sagacious, witty, ironic, mischievous and nonconformist thinker are manifested in these small fragments: his struggle for tolerance and freedom, the rejection of all dogma, a form of hypocrisy and manifestation of fanaticism, criticism to society, the announcement of a forthcoming revolution in France, the correct use of language, and the vindication of human sentiment against reason, among others.

In 1764 he himself, twenty-five years before the French Revolution, anticipated: "Everything that I see sheds the seeds of a revolution, which will inevitably happen." Voltaire was never a conventional philosopher "he never wanted to be either", as he did not develop systematic thinking and had an excessively hectic life. Both his presence in the Parisian salons and at the court of Versailles as well as his influence on European politics - between Potsdam and Paris was the game - leaves us the trace of a philosopher who was not only a disinterested contemplator of Truth, but an influential activist. politician capable of decisively intervening, with his letter and his person, in the course of the history of that century called "luminous".

With a lively, cheerful and open character, he could not evade the social and intellectual commitment to his time, and, as a good learned man and philosopher, he loved, above all, knowledge. For him, an Epicurean convinced from a young age, life had no meaning except as a happy life, hence the bonheur (happiness) constituted the cornerstone of his moral philosophy, an essentially hedonistic and pragmatic philosophy, as perhaps was everything that Voltaire he thought, said and did. The last verse of the poem Mondain (1736) reads like this: "The earthly paradise is where I am."