COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / VOLTAIRE’S HEROIC 40+ CUP A DAY HABIT

“Coffee is a poison. It is a slow poison.”

--Voltaire.

François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778) is known to the world as Voltaire.  His literary career spanned 60 years.  His works include “Candide” and “Letters Concerning the English Nation.”

Voltaire managed to sit still long
enough to pose for this portrait

History.com says of Voltaire: “Witty, acerbic and controversial in espousing his provocative ideas on religion, liberty and ethics saw him both celebrated and scorned in the courts of Europe, and later helped cement his reputation as one of the foundational figures of the Enlightenment.

“Voltaire wrote more than 50 plays, dozens of treatises on science, politics and philosophy, and several books of history on everything from the Russian Empire to the French Parliament. Along the way, he also managed to squeeze in heaps of verse and a voluminous correspondence amounting to some 20,000 letters to friends and contemporaries.

“Voltaire supposedly kept up his prodigious output by spending up to 18 hours a day writing or dictating to secretaries, often while still in bed. He may have also been fueled by heroic amounts of caffeine—according to some sources, it has been estimated he drank as many as 40 to 72 cups a day.”

SOURCE:

http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-should-know-about-voltaire/?cmpid=Social_Facebook_HITH_11232014_2

Read more Voltaire quotes:  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/v/voltaire.html