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Who really said it

Let us cultivate our garden

Written by Voltaire 1694–1778 · French Enlightenment writer & philosopher
Verified Free to reuse

It is the last sentence of Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759), chapter 30 — spoken by Candide, not by Voltaire in his own voice. The French is ‘Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ English versions split between ‘let us’ and ‘we must’; both render the impersonal il faut.

Last verified 28 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Let us cultivate our garden” Voltaire, Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759), closing line of chapter 30; French: "il faut cultiver notre jardin." Provenance verified at quotle.info

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Provenance

The source

Work
Candide, ou l’Optimisme
Published
January 1759 — issued simultaneously in Geneva, Amsterdam, London and Paris (exact date uncertain; no later than 15 January)
Location
Chapter 30 — the closing sentence
Speaker
Candide, replying to Pangloss

— Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles…
— Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. ↑ the popular version drops the seven words before it — and with them the fact that this is Candide changing the subject

The English wording is unusually unsettled for so famous a line. Wikiquote’s English gives ‘but let us cultivate our garden’; Wikipedia renders the same line ‘we must cultivate our garden’; older English quoting of the passage gives ‘let us take care of our garden’; Burton Raffel’s 2005 translation goes furthest with ‘We need to work our fields.’ The French is one sentence and does not change.

Candide, chapitre 30 (Garnier 1877) — French Wikisource

How we know

  • The sentence closes chapter 30 in the Garnier 1877 text at French Wikisource ↗. The same site’s Candide index ↗ hosts the Beuchot 1829 edition alongside Garnier 1877, if you want to compare editions.
  • Wikiquote ↗ has a page for the book alone and lists the line under chapter 30 with the French original.
  • Wikipedia’s article on Candide ↗ dates the first printing to no later than 15 January 1759, published simultaneously in five countries — Geneva (Cramer), Amsterdam (Marc-Michel Rey), London (Jean Nourse) and Paris (Lambert). Voltaire published it anonymously, as ‘translated from the German of Dr Ralph.’
  • An older English translation at Project Gutenberg ↗ (Boni & Liveright, 1918) closes chapter 30 on ‘but let us cultivate our garden’ — having rendered the same French phrase as ‘we must cultivate our garden’ a few lines earlier, where Candide first says it. Both English forms sit inside one text.
Public domain

Public domain. Candide was published in 1759 and Voltaire died in 1778; the French text and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English translations are all long out of copyright. Modern translations — Raffel’s 2005 version among them — are not.

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.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Context

Why it matters

Everything in Candide has gone wrong by chapter 30. The characters have been flogged, shipwrecked, robbed and disfigured across three continents, and Pangloss — still incorrigible — is explaining one last time that all events are linked for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Candide does not argue. He says the philosophy is very well put, and then he changes the subject to the vegetables.

That refusal is the ending. Voltaire does not disprove optimism; he walks away from the argument and puts his characters to work on a small piece of ground they can actually affect. Two and a half centuries of readers have taken the garden as retreat, as vocation, as quietism, as the only honest politics — the line survives partly because it declines to say which.

He does not refute Pangloss. He changes the subject to the vegetables — and that is the answer.

Why the English keeps changing

The French il faut is impersonal: closer to ‘one must’ than to either ‘we must’ or ‘let us.’ English has no comfortable equivalent, so translators pick a register, and the choice colours the sentence — ‘we must’ sounds like duty, ‘let us’ sounds like an invitation. Both are defensible readings of the same impersonal il faut.

The variant that surprises people is ‘take care of our garden,’ which survives in older English quoting of the passage — it is how the closing line is given in the anthology Masterpieces of the Masters of Fiction (Project Gutenberg #72848 ↗), though Gutenberg’s own Candide texts all use ‘cultivate.’ It is not an error; cultiver carries both senses. But ‘cultivate’ is what stuck, and it is the reason the line reads as a maxim rather than as a piece of household advice.

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

Candide, chapitre 30 (Garnier 1877)fr.wikisource.org

The French closing chapter, ending on the sentence in question.
Candide — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Quotations from the book arranged by chapter, with French originals beside the English.
Candide — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Publication history, the simultaneous 1759 printing across five countries, and the long argument over what the garden means.
Candide in English (Project Gutenberg)www.gutenberg.org

A public-domain English text whose chapter 30 closes ‘but let us cultivate our garden’ — the wording this page uses.

The true author

About Voltaire

Voltaire

1694–1778 · French Enlightenment philosopher

Voltaire — pen name of François-Marie Arouet — wrote Candide in 1758, in his sixties, after the Lisbon earthquake and the opening of the Seven Years’ War had made philosophical optimism look obscene to him. He published it anonymously; it was banned almost everywhere and sold everywhere. He spent his own last twenty years at Ferney, planting, building and running an estate — which is why the closing line reads less like a metaphor than like a plan.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Voltaire, Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759), chap. 30; text as in &Oelig;uvres complètes (Paris: Garnier, 1877).

MLA (9th ed.)

Voltaire. Candide, ou l’Optimisme. 1759. Chapter 30.

APA (7th ed.)

Voltaire. (1759). Candide, ou l’optimisme (Chap. 30).

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Let us cultivate our garden’?” Last verified 28 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/let-us-cultivate-our-garden/

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