Who really said it

One dies twice, I see it plainly; to cease to love and be loved is an unbearable death; to cease to live is nothing

Q: Is "One dies twice, I see it plainly; to cease to love and be loved is an unbearable death; to cease to live is nothing" really by Voltaire?

Yes. These four lines are the fifth stanza of Voltaire's 'Stances à Madame du Châtelet,' the poem that begins 'Si vous voulez que j'aime encore' and runs on for three further stanzas after them. Quote Investigator traces the earliest printing to the Paris journal Mercure de France in 1743, which reads cesser de plaire rather than cesser d'aimer; the familiar wording follows in the 1745 collected works.

Written by Voltaire 1694–1778 · French Enlightenment writer & philosopher

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These four lines are the fifth stanza of Voltaire’s ‘Stances à Madame du Châtelet,’ the poem that begins ‘Si vous voulez que j’aime encore’ and runs on for three further stanzas after them. Quote Investigator ↗ traces the earliest printing to the Paris journal Mercure de France in 1743, which reads cesser de plaire rather than cesser d’aimer; the familiar wording follows in the 1745 collected works.

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

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“One dies twice, I see it plainly; to cease to love and be loved is an unbearable death; to cease to live is nothing” Voltaire, fifth stanza of 'Stances à Madame du Châtelet' (this wording in Œuvres de Mr. de Voltaire, tome sixième, 1745). Provenance verified at quotle.info

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Provenance

The source

Work: Stances à Madame du Châtelet (also printed as ‘À Mme du Châtelet’; incipit ‘Si vous voulez que j’aime encore’)
Form: Poem in eight stanzas — these four lines are the fifth
Earliest printing: Mercure de France, 1743 (variant wording: ‘cesser de plaire’)
Familiar text: Œuvres de Mr. de Voltaire, tome sixième, 1745

On meurt deux fois, je le vois bien:
Cesser d’aimer et d’être aimable,
C’est une mort insupportable;
Cesser de vivre, ce n’est rien.

The popular English says ‘to cease to love and be loved.’ Voltaire wrote cesser d’aimer et d’être aimable — to cease to love and to be lovable. The difference is the whole point: he is writing about ageing out of the capacity to attract, not about losing someone’s affection. The English wording used here is a common prose rendering with no identified translator; Quote Investigator records a distinct 1870 verse translation (‘Ceasing to love or love to kindle’). If your English comes from a named modern translation, check that edition’s rights.

Quote Investigator — the tracing to 1743 and 1745

How we know

Quote Investigator ↗ gives the tracing: a variant in the Mercure de France in 1743, reading cesser de plaire et d’être aimable, then the settled text in Œuvres de Mr. de Voltaire, tome sixième, in 1745.
The poem is enclosed in Voltaire’s letter to Cideville of 11 July 1741, sent from Brussels, at French Wikisource ↗, where the quatrain sits mid-poem with three stanzas still to come — evidence the verse circulated in correspondence before it reached print.
Both the printed sources and the manuscript trail run through du Châtelet, Voltaire’s companion and intellectual partner of sixteen years, which is what fixes the poem’s subject as well as its author.

Public domain

Public domain. The French verse was in print by 1743 and Voltaire died in 1778; nothing here is anywhere near 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.

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

The poem opens by asking Émilie du Châtelet to give him back the age of love if she wants him to go on loving. The quatrain is not the settlement but the low point — the fifth stanza of eight, the moment Voltaire concedes the passion is gone. The consolation comes after it: Friendship deigns to descend from heaven to his rescue, and the poem ends with him following her, weeping that he can now follow no one else.

What makes the four lines land is the ranking. He is not saying that love matters more than survival in some sentimental way; he is saying, flatly and with the shrug of ‘je le vois bien,’ that he has already been through the worse of the two deaths and found the other one negligible by comparison.

He is not ranking love above life for effect. He has already been through the first death and found the second one negligible.

The word the English loses

Être aimable is not ‘to be loved.’ It means to be lovable — attractive, worth loving. Voltaire is describing the moment a person stops being someone others could fall for, which is a fact about ageing rather than about a relationship ending. English translations almost always flatten it to ‘be loved,’ which turns a poem about growing old into a poem about being left.

The dating is layered rather than uncertain. Quote Investigator records a 1741 dating drawn from a modern reference work (The Quotable Voltaire, 2021) without resolving it against its own primary printings — the Mercure de France in 1743, in a variant reading, then the familiar wording in the 1745 collected works. What makes 1741 checkable is the letter to Cideville on French Wikisource, which encloses the whole poem. This page cites the print record for the wording, because that is where the wording is fixed.

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Filed under

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

Love Mortality

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.

One Dies Twice — Quote Investigatorquoteinvestigator.com

Traces the quatrain to the Mercure de France in 1743 and the 1745 collected works, with the French text and an English rendering.

Correspondance de Voltaire, 1741 — Lettre 1457fr.wikisource.org

Voltaire's letter to Cideville of 11 July 1741, from Brussels, enclosing the poem; the quatrain appears mid-poem, with three stanzas after it.

Émilie du Châteleten.wikipedia.org

The mathematician and physicist the poem is addressed to, and Voltaire's companion from 1733 until her death in 1749.

Voltaire — biographyen.wikipedia.org

Background on Voltaire and the du Châtelet years (1733–1749); he had been living largely in Brussels since 1739 while she pursued her Limburg lawsuit, and the poem was sent from there in July 1741.

The true author

About Voltaire

Voltaire

1694–1778 · French Enlightenment philosopher

Voltaire — pen name of François-Marie Arouet — is remembered for the satire and the polemics, which makes the love poetry easy to miss. He spent the 1730s and 1740s at Cirey with Émilie du Châtelet, the physicist who translated Newton’s Principia into French; by the time he wrote these stanzas he was in his late forties and their affair had cooled into something else. The quatrain is what he made of that.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Voltaire, “Stances à Madame du Châtelet” (‘Si vous voulez que j’aime encore’), fifth stanza; first printed in the Mercure de France (Paris, 1743) in a variant reading (‘cesser de plaire’), and in this wording in Œuvres de Mr. de Voltaire, tome sixième (1745).

MLA (9th ed.)

Voltaire. “Stances à Madame du Châtelet.” Œuvres de Mr. de Voltaire, tome sixième, 1745. Earlier variant printing: Mercure de France, 1743.

APA (7th ed.)

Voltaire. (1745). Stances à Madame du Châtelet. In Œuvres de Mr. de Voltaire (Tome sixième). Earlier variant printing: Mercure de France, 1743.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘One dies twice, I see it plainly’?” Last verified 28 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/one-dies-twice-i-see-it-plainly-to-cease-to-love-and-be/