Candido, O El Optimismo
1759
A young man raised in a paradise of philosophical optimism gets thrown into a world that refuses to cooperate with his tutor's beautiful theories. Candide loves Cunegonde, gets caught, gets kicked out of the castle, and immediately begins a picaresque journey through wars, earthquakes, shipwacks, auto-da-fé, and various forms of torture, all while his tutor Dr. Pangloss insists, with heroic absurdity, that this remains the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire's 1759 masterpiece is a compact rocket of fury: it takes dead aim at the complacent optimism of Enlightenment philosophy and asks, with escalating comic horror, how anyone could watch a Lisbon earthquake, a syphilis epidemic, or the Bulgarian army and still insist everything happens for a reason. The satire never lets up, but what gives the book its strange warmth is Candide himself, never quite as clever as his creator, but stubbornly decent, and eventually wise enough to abandon grand theories for a simple, hard-won piece of advice: cultivate your garden. Still sharp, still funny, still the most satisfying refutation of blind faith ever written.
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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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