## Candide ### Candide  #### Metadata * Author: [[Voltaire]] * Full Title: Candide * Category: #books #### Highlights * "It is demonstrable," said he, "that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles; therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings; accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles; therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. (Location 409) * "must in some things have deviated from their original innocence; for they were not born wolves, and yet they worry one another like those beasts of prey. God never gave them twenty-four pounders nor bayonets, and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another. To this list I might add not only bankruptcies, but the law which seizes on the effects of bankrupts, only to cheat the creditors." (Location 554) * The sailor, whistling and swearing, cried: "Damn it, there's something to be got here!" "What can be the 'sufficient reason' of this phenomenon?" said Pangloss. "It is certainly the Day of Judgment," said Candide. The sailor, defying death in the pursuit of plunder, rushed into the midst of the ruin, where he found some money, with which he got drunk, and after he had slept off the alcohol, he purchased the favours of the first good-natured wench that came his way, amidst the ruins of demolished houses and the groans of half-buried and expiring persons. Pangloss pulled him by the sleeve: "Friend," said he, "this is not right; you trespass against the universal reason, and your behavior is untimely." "Bloody Hell!" answered the other, "I am a sailor and born at Batavia, and have trampled four times upon the crucifix in as many voyages to Japan;6 get out of here with your universal reason." (Location 582) * "I humbly ask your excellency's pardon," answered Pangloss, still more politely; "for the fall of man, and the consequent curse, necessarily entered into the system of the best of worlds." "That is as much as to say, sir," rejoined the familiar, "you do not believe in free-will."8 "Your excellency will be so good as to excuse me," said Pangloss; "free-will is consistent with absolute necessity; for it was necessary we should be free, for in that the will—" Pangloss was in the midst of his proposition when the Inquisitor beckoned to his attendant to help him to a glass of port wine. (Location 606) * This Jew showed me great kindness, in hopes to gain my favours; but this got him nowhere with me. A modest woman may be once violated, but her virtue is greatly strengthened as a result. (Location 684) * "Here's another fine piece of work!" cried Cunégonde. "Now there can be no hope for us; we'll be excommunicated; our last hour has come! But how could you, who are of so mild a temper, kill a Jew and Inquisitor in two minutes' time?" "Beautiful miss," answered Candide, "when a man is in love, is jealous, and has been whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself." (Location 734) * "he tells you nothing but the truth. I happened to be in Paris when Miss Monimia made her exit, as one may say, out of this world into another. She was refused what they call here the rites of sepulture; that is to say she was denied the privilege of rotting in a churchyard by the side of all the beggars in the parish.22 They buried her at the corner of Burgundy Street, which must certainly have shocked her, for she had very exalted notions of things." "That was very rude," said Candide. "Lord!" said Martin, "what do you expect? It is the way of these people. Imagine all the contradictions, all the inconsistencies possible, and you may meet with them in the government, the courts of justice, the churches, and the public spectacles of this odd nation." (Location 1401) * Dinner being served, they sat down to the table, and after a hearty meal, returned to the library. Candide, seeing a copy of Homerbv in splendid binding, complimented the noble Venetian's taste. "This," said he, "is a book that was once the delight of the great Pangloss, the best philosopher in Germany." (Location 1651) * do not think there has ever before been an instance of six dethroned monarchs eating together at a public inn." "This is not more extraordinary," said Martin, "than most of what has happened to us. It is a very common thing for kings to be dethroned; and as for our having the honour to eat with six of them, it is a mere accident which doesn't deserve our attention." (Location 1775) * Candide, who was married to his mistress, and living with the philosopher Pangloss, the philosopher Martin, the prudent Cacambo, and the old woman, and who had also brought home so many diamonds from the country of the ancient Incas, would lead the most agreeable life in the world. But he had been so cheated by the Jews32 that he had nothing else left but his little farm; his wife, every day growing more and more ugly, became headstrong and insupportable; the old woman was infirm, and more ill-natured even than Cunégonde. Cacambo, who worked in the garden, and carried the produce of it to sell at Constantinople, was worn down by this labour, and cursed his fate. Pangloss was in despair at being unable to make a name for himself in any of the German universities. (Location 1898) * old woman ventured one day to tell them, "I would be glad to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fé, to be dissected, to be chained to an oar in a galley; and, in short, to experience all the miseries through which every one of us has passed, or to remain here doing nothing?" "This," said Candide, "is a grand question." (Location 1910) * This discourse gave birth to new reflections, and Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom. Candide did not agree, but he did not provide any other opinion. (Location 1914) * Pangloss; for when man was put into the Garden of Eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle." (Location 1952) * Candide: "All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for, after all, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for your love of Miss Cunégonde, had you not been put into the Inquisition, had you not travelled across America on foot, had you not stabbed the Baron with your sword, and had you not lost all your sheep which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, then you wouldn't be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts." "Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but we must cultivate our garden." (Location 1957) * (p. 26) they felt the earth tremble under their feet, and . . . thirty thousand inhabitants ... were buried beneath the ruins: The Lisbon earthquake and fire of November 1, 1755, had an enormous impact on Voltaire and was one of the contemporary tragedies that caused him to question Leibniz's philosophical optimism, as especially evident in his eloquent Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756) and, of course, in Candide. (Location 1976) * "you do not believe in free-will": Free will versus determinism is widely debated in philosophical and theological circles. Blindly faithful to Leibniz in this respect, as in so many others, Pangloss feebly tries to explain the philosopher's attempt to reconcile metaphysical necessity with his belief in freedom. (Location 1985) * an auto-da-fé: The name—Portuguese for "act of faith"—of a church ceremony consisting of a procession, mass, and burning at the stake of heretics condemned by the Inquisition. An auto-da-fé took place in Lisbon on June 20, 1756. 10 (p. 28) rounded up a Biscayner for marrying his godmother: Such a marriage was condemned as incest, since the Catholic Church viewed a godmother as a relative. (Location 1988) * "let's eat this Jesuit": The French phrase "Mangeons du jésuite" caught the popular fancy at a time of rising hostility to the Jesuits, culminating in their expulsion from France in 1764. (Location 2012) * Manichœan: A believer in two coequal spirits of Good and Evil struggling to gain the upper hand in the Universe. Mani, or Manicheus, was a Persian philosopher of the third century B.C. who posited a primal struggle between these two opposing and equal forces or principles, one of light and the other of darkness. Manichaeism, which is fundamentally pessimistic, was frequently confused with Socinianism in the eighteenth century, probably because both were heretical. Hence Martin's ironical remark. (Location 2018) * "But your excellency does not hold the same opinion of Virgil?" . . . "I prefer Tasso and even that sleepy tale-teller Ariosto: The Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.) wrote the epic poem the Aenied; until the nineteenth century, many ranked him above Homer; the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544—1595) wrote Jerusalem Delivered; the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) wrote Orlando Furioso. 28 (p. 108) "May I take the liberty to ask if you do not get great pleasure from reading Horace?" . . . . "I see nothing extraordinary in his journey to Brundusium . . . language was dipped in vinegar. His indelicate verses . . . great offence: Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65—8 B.C.), known as Horace, was one of the greatest Latin poets. The ancient city Brundusium, the modern Brindisi, is located on the heel of the boot of Italy. The phrase "dipped in vinegar" is a reference to a phrase in Horace's Satires (satire 1, book 7). "His indelicate verses" is a reference to Horace's Epodes 5, 8, and 12. (Location 2044) * The civilized world was horrified by the news of the terrible earthquake of Lisbon (November 1, 1755). Strictly considered, this frightful catastrophe was only, on a large scale, what, on a smaller, was, and is, happening every day. A vessel founders at sea, a house or theatre is on fire: the just and unjust alike, parents and innocent children, perish in the waves or in the flames, and there is weeping and wailing in many a home. But the colossal magnitude of the appalling disaster at Lisbon made transcendently more intense that feeling of the problematic in human destiny, which is aroused more or less, in susceptive minds, by the vicissitudes of daily life. Goethe, then a boy of six, was as much perplexed as the sexagenarian Voltaire how to reconcile the goodness of the Deity with the seemingly aimless cruelty of what he had permitted, or ordained, to happen at Lisbon. The "whatever is is right," the "all partial evil universal good," of Pope's famous essay, so much admired by Voltaire, who translated them into the pithy formula: "All is well" (tout est bien), were now pronounced by him unsatisfactory. He had opposed a sort of optimism of his own to Pascal's pessimism, and in "Le Mondain" had sung of the pleasures enjoyed by cultivated and civilized man. But he now struck his lyre to a very different tune in his "Poem on the Disaster at Lisbon; or, an Examination of the Axiom, All is Well"—to which he opposed a gloomy catalogue of all the ills that flesh is heir to.... Though not printed until some years later, [Candide] was begun soon after the Lisbon earthquake. (Location 2102) * [Voltaire] wrote enormously: plays (now forgotten); short stories, and some of them still read—especially that masterpiece, Candide. He was a journalist, and a pamphleteer, he dabbled in science and philosophy, he was a good popular historian, he compiled a dictionary, and he wrote hundreds of letters to people all over Europe. He had correspondents everywhere, and he was so witty, so up-to-date, so on the spot that kings and emperors were proud to get a letter from Voltaire and hurried to answer it with their own hand. He is not a great creative artist. But he is a great man with a powerful intellect and a warm heart, enlisted in the service of humanity. That is why I rank him with Shakespeare as a spiritual spokesman for Europe. Two hundred years before the Nazis came, he was the complete anti-Nazi. (Location 2127) * What do you understand Candide to mean when he says that from now on he will "tend his garden"? Refrain from public life? Accept things as they are? Try to expand this phrase into a program for living. (Location 2141) * What is your own answer to the violence and misery of human life as Voltaire depicts it? (Location 2143) # Candide  ## Metadata - Author: [[Voltaire]] - Full Title: Candide - Category: #books ## Highlights - “It is demonstrable,” said he, “that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles; therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings; accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles; therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. (Location 409) - “must in some things have deviated from their original innocence; for they were not born wolves, and yet they worry one another like those beasts of prey. God never gave them twenty-four pounders nor bayonets, and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another. To this list I might add not only bankruptcies, but the law which seizes on the effects of bankrupts, only to cheat the creditors.” (Location 554) - The sailor, whistling and swearing, cried: “Damn it, there’s something to be got here!” “What can be the ‘sufficient reason’ of this phenomenon?” said Pangloss. “It is certainly the Day of Judgment,” said Candide. The sailor, defying death in the pursuit of plunder, rushed into the midst of the ruin, where he found some money, with which he got drunk, and after he had slept off the alcohol, he purchased the favours of the first good-natured wench that came his way, amidst the ruins of demolished houses and the groans of half-buried and expiring persons. Pangloss pulled him by the sleeve: “Friend,” said he, “this is not right; you trespass against the universal reason, and your behavior is untimely.” “Bloody Hell!” answered the other, “I am a sailor and born at Batavia, and have trampled four times upon the crucifix in as many voyages to Japan;6 get out of here with your universal reason.” (Location 582) - “I humbly ask your excellency’s pardon,” answered Pangloss, still more politely; “for the fall of man, and the consequent curse, necessarily entered into the system of the best of worlds.” “That is as much as to say, sir,” rejoined the familiar, “you do not believe in free-will.”8 “Your excellency will be so good as to excuse me,” said Pangloss; “free-will is consistent with absolute necessity; for it was necessary we should be free, for in that the will—” Pangloss was in the midst of his proposition when the Inquisitor beckoned to his attendant to help him to a glass of port wine. (Location 606) - This Jew showed me great kindness, in hopes to gain my favours; but this got him nowhere with me. A modest woman may be once violated, but her virtue is greatly strengthened as a result. (Location 684) - ”Here’s another fine piece of work!” cried Cunégonde. ”Now there can be no hope for us; we’ll be excommunicated; our last hour has come! But how could you, who are of so mild a temper, kill a Jew and Inquisitor in two minutes’ time?” “Beautiful miss,” answered Candide, ”when a man is in love, is jealous, and has been whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself.” (Location 734) - “he tells you nothing but the truth. I happened to be in Paris when Miss Monimia made her exit, as one may say, out of this world into another. She was refused what they call here the rites of sepulture; that is to say she was denied the privilege of rotting in a churchyard by the side of all the beggars in the parish.22 They buried her at the corner of Burgundy Street, which must certainly have shocked her, for she had very exalted notions of things.” “That was very rude,” said Candide. “Lord!” said Martin, “what do you expect? It is the way of these people. Imagine all the contradictions, all the inconsistencies possible, and you may meet with them in the government, the courts of justice, the churches, and the public spectacles of this odd nation.” (Location 1401) - Dinner being served, they sat down to the table, and after a hearty meal, returned to the library. Candide, seeing a copy of Homerbv in splendid binding, complimented the noble Venetian’s taste. “This,” said he, “is a book that was once the delight of the great Pangloss, the best philosopher in Germany.” (Location 1651) - do not think there has ever before been an instance of six dethroned monarchs eating together at a public inn.” “This is not more extraordinary,” said Martin, “than most of what has happened to us. It is a very common thing for kings to be dethroned; and as for our having the honour to eat with six of them, it is a mere accident which doesn’t deserve our attention.” (Location 1775) - Candide, who was married to his mistress, and living with the philosopher Pangloss, the philosopher Martin, the prudent Cacambo, and the old woman, and who had also brought home so many diamonds from the country of the ancient Incas, would lead the most agreeable life in the world. But he had been so cheated by the Jews32 that he had nothing else left but his little farm; his wife, every day growing more and more ugly, became headstrong and insupportable; the old woman was infirm, and more ill-natured even than Cunégonde. Cacambo, who worked in the garden, and carried the produce of it to sell at Constantinople, was worn down by this labour, and cursed his fate. Pangloss was in despair at being unable to make a name for himself in any of the German universities. (Location 1898) - old woman ventured one day to tell them, “I would be glad to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fé, to be dissected, to be chained to an oar in a galley; and, in short, to experience all the miseries through which every one of us has passed, or to remain here doing nothing?” “This,” said Candide, “is a grand question.” (Location 1910) - This discourse gave birth to new reflections, and Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom. Candide did not agree, but he did not provide any other opinion. (Location 1914) - Pangloss; for when man was put into the Garden of Eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.” (Location 1952) - Candide: “All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds; for, after all, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for your love of Miss Cunégonde, had you not been put into the Inquisition, had you not travelled across America on foot, had you not stabbed the Baron with your sword, and had you not lost all your sheep which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, then you wouldn’t be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.” “Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but we must cultivate our garden.” (Location 1957) - (p. 26) they felt the earth tremble under their feet, and . . . thirty thousand inhabitants ... were buried beneath the ruins: The Lisbon earthquake and fire of November 1, 1755, had an enormous impact on Voltaire and was one of the contemporary tragedies that caused him to question Leibniz’s philosophical optimism, as especially evident in his eloquent Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756) and, of course, in Candide. (Location 1976) - “you do not believe in free-will”: Free will versus determinism is widely debated in philosophical and theological circles. Blindly faithful to Leibniz in this respect, as in so many others, Pangloss feebly tries to explain the philosopher’s attempt to reconcile metaphysical necessity with his belief in freedom. (Location 1985) - an auto-da-fé: The name—Portuguese for “act of faith”—of a church ceremony consisting of a procession, mass, and burning at the stake of heretics condemned by the Inquisition. An auto-da-fé took place in Lisbon on June 20, 1756. 10 (p. 28) rounded up a Biscayner for marrying his godmother: Such a marriage was condemned as incest, since the Catholic Church viewed a godmother as a relative. (Location 1988) - “let’s eat this Jesuit”: The French phrase “Mangeons du jésuite” caught the popular fancy at a time of rising hostility to the Jesuits, culminating in their expulsion from France in 1764. (Location 2012) - Manichœan: A believer in two coequal spirits of Good and Evil struggling to gain the upper hand in the Universe. Mani, or Manicheus, was a Persian philosopher of the third century B.C. who posited a primal struggle between these two opposing and equal forces or principles, one of light and the other of darkness. Manichaeism, which is fundamentally pessimistic, was frequently confused with Socinianism in the eighteenth century, probably because both were heretical. Hence Martin’s ironical remark. (Location 2018) - “But your excellency does not hold the same opinion of Virgil?” . . . “I prefer Tasso and even that sleepy tale-teller Ariosto: The Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.) wrote the epic poem the Aenied; until the nineteenth century, many ranked him above Homer; the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544—1595) wrote Jerusalem Delivered; the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) wrote Orlando Furioso. 28 (p. 108) ”May I take the liberty to ask if you do not get great pleasure from reading Horace?” . . . . ”I see nothing extraordinary in his journey to Brundusium . . . language was dipped in vinegar. His indelicate verses . . . great offence: Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65—8 B.C.), known as Horace, was one of the greatest Latin poets. The ancient city Brundusium, the modern Brindisi, is located on the heel of the boot of Italy. The phrase “dipped in vinegar” is a reference to a phrase in Horace’s Satires (satire 1, book 7). “His indelicate verses” is a reference to Horace’s Epodes 5, 8, and 12. (Location 2044) - The civilized world was horrified by the news of the terrible earthquake of Lisbon (November 1, 1755). Strictly considered, this frightful catastrophe was only, on a large scale, what, on a smaller, was, and is, happening every day. A vessel founders at sea, a house or theatre is on fire: the just and unjust alike, parents and innocent children, perish in the waves or in the flames, and there is weeping and wailing in many a home. But the colossal magnitude of the appalling disaster at Lisbon made transcendently more intense that feeling of the problematic in human destiny, which is aroused more or less, in susceptive minds, by the vicissitudes of daily life. Goethe, then a boy of six, was as much perplexed as the sexagenarian Voltaire how to reconcile the goodness of the Deity with the seemingly aimless cruelty of what he had permitted, or ordained, to happen at Lisbon. The “whatever is is right,” the “all partial evil universal good,” of Pope’s famous essay, so much admired by Voltaire, who translated them into the pithy formula: “All is well” (tout est bien), were now pronounced by him unsatisfactory. He had opposed a sort of optimism of his own to Pascal’s pessimism, and in “Le Mondain” had sung of the pleasures enjoyed by cultivated and civilized man. But he now struck his lyre to a very different tune in his “Poem on the Disaster at Lisbon; or, an Examination of the Axiom, All is Well”—to which he opposed a gloomy catalogue of all the ills that flesh is heir to.... Though not printed until some years later, [Candide] was begun soon after the Lisbon earthquake. (Location 2102) - [Voltaire] wrote enormously: plays (now forgotten); short stories, and some of them still read—especially that masterpiece, Candide. He was a journalist, and a pamphleteer, he dabbled in science and philosophy, he was a good popular historian, he compiled a dictionary, and he wrote hundreds of letters to people all over Europe. He had correspondents everywhere, and he was so witty, so up-to-date, so on the spot that kings and emperors were proud to get a letter from Voltaire and hurried to answer it with their own hand. He is not a great creative artist. But he is a great man with a powerful intellect and a warm heart, enlisted in the service of humanity. That is why I rank him with Shakespeare as a spiritual spokesman for Europe. Two hundred years before the Nazis came, he was the complete anti-Nazi. (Location 2127) - What do you understand Candide to mean when he says that from now on he will “tend his garden”? Refrain from public life? Accept things as they are? Try to expand this phrase into a program for living. (Location 2141) - What is your own answer to the violence and misery of human life as Voltaire depicts it? (Location 2143)