Ο Αγαθούλης
1759
One of the most devastating satires ever written, Voltaire's Candide shreds the idea that we live in "the best of all possible worlds" through a lightning-fast tale of disaster and absurdity. When the innocent Candide is kicked out of his comfortable castle for kissing the Baron's daughter, he embarks on a journey across continents that systematically dismantles his tutor Pangloss's cheery philosophy: earthquakes are merely local inconveniences, murdered families are a necessary component of the grand design, and every catastrophe serves some unfathomable greater good. Candide witnesses hangings, Lisbon's great earthquake, a Bulgarian army that massacres everything in its path, and scenes of colonial brutality in the New World. Through it all, Pangloss remains cheerfully oblivious, spinning increasingly unhinged explanations for why suffering is actually wonderful. By the novel's end, the naive optimism that began the story has been thoroughly demolished, replaced by something quieter and harder-won: the recognition that we must tend our own garden rather than trust in cosmic benevolence.
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“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?””
— Voltaire
“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.””
— Voltaire
“You're a bitter man," said Candide.That's because I've lived," said Martin.””
— Voltaire
“Let us cultivate our garden.””
— Voltaire
“Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.””
— Voltaire
“But for what purpose was the earth formed?" asked Candide. "To drive us mad," replied Martin.””
— Voltaire
“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?””
— Voltaire
“I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?'That is a hard question,' said Candide.””
— Voltaire
“Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.””
— Voltaire
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Voltaire. Ο Αγαθούλης. Lex, lex-books.com/book/-2596dd4d-a9d5-43b5-b4aa-4c094ffc47a6.Voltaire (1759). Ο Αγαθούλης. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/-2596dd4d-a9d5-43b5-b4aa-4c094ffc47a6Voltaire. Ο Αγαθούλης. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/-2596dd4d-a9d5-43b5-b4aa-4c094ffc47a6.
