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Who really said it

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd

Written by Voltaire 1694–1778 · French Enlightenment writer & philosopher
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From Voltaire’s letter of 28 November 1770 to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia. The wording most people quote is S. G. Tallentyre’s 1919 English translation in Voltaire in His Letters ↗; the French original reads ‘l’assurance est un état ridicule.’

Last verified 7 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd” Voltaire, letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, 28 November 1770 (trans. S. G. Tallentyre, "Voltaire in His Letters," 1919).

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Provenance

The source

Work
Letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia
Written
28 November 1770
Published in
Voltaire in His Letters
Translator
S. G. Tallentyre (Evelyn Beatrice Hall), 1919

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in the System of Nature — after the recipe for making eels from flour — is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried to prove the impossibility. ↑ the popular version keeps only the first clause — and drops the jab at d’Holbach that follows

In the original French: ‘Le doute n’est pas un état bien agréable, mais l’assurance est un état ridicule.’ Tallentyre’s choice of ‘certainty…absurd’ is the wording that went viral; other translations give ‘ridiculous’ for ridicule, and some paraphrases open with ‘Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.’ All render the same genuine sentence.

Voltaire in His Letters (Tallentyre, 1919) — the passage on WIST

How we know

  • The line comes from Voltaire’s letter of 28 November 1770 to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, catalogued in the sourced section of Wikiquote ↗ — not among its misattributed or disputed entries.
  • WIST ↗ pins the English wording to S. G. Tallentyre’s 1919 translation, Voltaire in His Letters, and prints the French original alongside it.
  • QuotePark ↗ preserves the fuller sentence, where Voltaire goes on to mock d’Holbach’s Système de la nature for declaring there is no God without proving it.
Public domain

Public domain. Both the 1770 French original and Tallentyre’s 1919 English translation are long out of copyright.

This reflects the original work, which is public domain. If your exact English wording comes from a specific modern translation, that translation may itself still be under copyright — check the edition you quote.

Context

Why it matters

Voltaire wrote this in his mid-seventies, at Ferney, as Europe’s philosophes split over Baron d’Holbach’s anonymously published Système de la nature (1770) — a thoroughgoing atheist, materialist manifesto. A deist to the end, Voltaire found its dogmatic certainty as objectionable as the religious dogmatism he had spent a lifetime fighting.

The famous first clause is the hinge of that critique: doubt is uncomfortable, he concedes, but the person who claims to have settled the biggest questions for good has simply traded one absurdity for another. It is skepticism turned against the confident unbelievers as readily as the believers.

Doubt is uncomfortable — but the person who is certain has only traded one absurdity for another.

A note on the recipient and the wandering wording

The letter is addressed to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia (1744–1797), nephew and heir of Frederick the Great — not to Frederick II himself, though some compilations blur the two. It is occasionally mis-dated to 1767, conflating it with an earlier letter to the King.

Because the quote survives mainly through translation, its English form drifts: ‘an absurd one,’ ‘a ridiculous one,’ and the looser ‘Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position…’ all circulate. They are variant renderings of one authentic sentence, not separate quotations.

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Voltaire — Wikiquote (sourced section)en.wikiquote.org

Lists the quote under the 1770s letters with French original and source citation, in the verified section rather than among misattributed lines.
Letter to Frederick William of Prussia (1770)wist.info

Attributes the English wording to Tallentyre’s 1919 translation and prints the French original beside it.
The full passage on d’Holbachquotepark.com

Reproduces the complete sentence and cites Voltaire in His Letters (1919), p. 232.
Voltaire — biographyen.wikipedia.org

Background on Voltaire, his deism, and his quarrel with the materialist philosophes of the 1770s.

The true author

About Voltaire

Voltaire

1694–1778 · French Enlightenment philosopher

Voltaire — pen name of François-Marie Arouet — was the wit and conscience of the French Enlightenment, a prolific author of plays, histories, essays and some fifteen thousand surviving letters. A lifelong deist, he championed religious tolerance and free inquiry while attacking dogmatism of every stripe. This line comes from that skeptical temperament: written in old age, it rebukes the confident atheism of d’Holbach as just another kind of certainty he distrusted.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Voltaire to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, 28 November 1770, in Voltaire in His Letters: Being a Selection from His Correspondence, trans. S. G. Tallentyre (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919), 232.

MLA (9th ed.)

Voltaire. “Letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia.” Voltaire in His Letters: Being a Selection from His Correspondence, translated by S. G. Tallentyre, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919, p. 232.

APA (7th ed.)

Voltaire. (1919). Voltaire in his letters: Being a selection from his correspondence (S. G. Tallentyre, Trans.). G. P. Putnam’s Sons. (Original work published 1770)

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd’?” Last verified 7 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/doubt-is-not-a-pleasant-condition-but-certainty-is-absurd

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