Candide Quotes

Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other.

I tend to look at the world more from Voltaire's perspective. Incidentally, if you haven't read Candide lately, it's a fabulous book. It's riotously, laugh-out-loud funny in a way that no Shakespeare comedy will ever be.

It's a book that makes me laugh and think - it would be very hard to like someone who didn't enjoy Candide!

Also, everyone thinks they know Candide - you hear people described as 'Panglossian'. So if Candide appears on a poster, it feels familiar.

Kissinger projects a strong impression of a man at home in the world and on top of his brief. But there are a number of occasions when it suits him to pose as a sort of Candide: naive, and ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events. No doubt this pose costs him something in point of self-esteem. It is a pose, furthermore, which he often adopts at precisely the time when the record shows him to be knowledgeable, and when knowledge or foreknowledge would also confront him with charges of responsibility or complicity.

Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.

Candide is one of those books I read when I was young and that I come back to regularly.

The guy's life drunk, I think, makes Candide look like a sourpuss. Does he even know that death exists?

I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

I'm not Candide, nor Dr Pangloss, but we know that faith moves mountains.

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

Dogs, monkeys, and parrots are a thousand times less miserable than we are.

Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a way into something important happening in modern-day culture.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

We must cultivate our own garden.

What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide. "That is because I know what life is," said Martin.

All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.

Excellently observed", answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden.

But for what purpose was the earth formed?" asked Candide. "To drive us mad," replied Martin.

It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love.

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

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.

The Saga of Dharmapuri is one of the great works of modern Indian literature. (...) Set against Vijayan's heroic and scatological Candide -- originally written in Malayalam and finely translated into English by the author -- the timidity of our own English talent for political satire is embarrassingly laid bare. For this is dangerous stuff, and cut close to the bone. (...) Fiercest of all is Vijayan's Voltairean recoil from Indian cringing to power.

When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?

"You're a bitter man," said Candide. "That's because I've lived," said Martin.

Translating Candide into tweets has really deepened my appreciation of his writing - it wouldn't work so well with nineteenth-century authors. Every single sentence in Voltaire seems to advance the story, and yet stand alone as a sound-bite.

We live in the best of all possible worlds

All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunegonde, if you hadn't been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn't traveled across America on foot, if you hadn't given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn't lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn't be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. - That is very well put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.

Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.

Alas...I too have known love, that ruler of hearts, that soul of our soul: it's never brought me anything except one kiss and twenty kicks in the rump. How could such a beautiful cause produce such an abominable effect on you?

What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?

I have not chosen to create a linear story, but a series of different narratives: in the end there are five plays that almost, but don't quite, add up to one play... I start with the story of Candide, being performed as a play within a play, to bring the audience up to speed with the story.

"I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want."