Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

The line expresses a strongly voluntarist idea of freedom: that liberty is, at least in part, an act of will—one becomes free the moment one decisively chooses freedom. Read this way, it emphasizes inner autonomy over external conditions, suggesting that mental resolve can break the chains of fear, habit, or deference to authority. At the same time, the aphorism can be read as polemical: it compresses a complex Enlightenment debate about free will, moral responsibility, and political liberty into a memorable paradox. If genuinely Voltairean, it would fit his tendency to use epigram to provoke reflection rather than to offer a systematic doctrine.