Candide Quotes

Favorite quotes from Candide:

“A hundred times I wanted to kill myself, but still I loved life. This ridiculous weakness for living is perhaps one of our most fatal tendencies. For can anything be silier than to insist on carrying a burden one would continually much rather throw to the ground? Sillier than to feel disgust at one’s own existence and yet cling to it? Sillier, in short, than to clasp to our heart?”

“But human nature in its pure state is good after all, since these people, instead of eating me, were all sweetness and light the minute they knew I wasn’t a Jesuit.”

“‘We don’t pray to God,’ said the good and worthy sage. ‘We have nothing to ask him for. He has given us all we need, and we never cease to thank him.’”

“‘I’m afraid to say,’ said Candide, ‘that it’s a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.’”

“‘Do you think’, said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other the way they do now? that they’ve always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands? that they’ve always been feeble, fickly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, avaricious, ambitious, blood-thirsty, slanderous, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and stupid?’ / ‘Do you think’, said Martin, ‘that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they find them?’ / ‘Yes, no doubt,’ said Candide. / ‘Well, then,’ said Martin, ‘if hawks have always had the same character, why do you expect me to have changed theirs?’ / ‘Oh!’ said Candide, ‘there’s a big difference, because free will…’”

“Your presence will restore me to life, or make me die of pleasure.”

“All is but illusion and calamity.”

“Fools admire everything in a respected author.”

“I might have got on better with his philisophical works, but when I saw that he doubted everything, I decided that I knew as much as he did, and that I didn’t need anyone else’s help if I was going to be ignorant.”

“Work keeps us from the three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”