Synopsis
Candide, the quintessential innocent, has been taught by his tutor, Pangloss, that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." Gradually, Candide and his beloved, Cunegonde, learn--as they travel through a world peopled with evil characters and various cruelties--the limits of Pangloss's philosophy. Voltaire's great comic masterpiece is a satire of the doctrine of optimism, which Voltaire sees as a blind acceptance of human misery.

Details
Publication Date:	1991-01-01
Series:	Dover Thrift Editions Series
Edition Description:	Reprint

Size
Height:	8.3 in
Width:	5.3 in
Thickness:	0.5 in
Weight:	3.2 oz

Publisher's Note
Tells the story of Candide, a naive youth, who is conscripted, shipwrecked, robbed, and tortured by the Inquisition without losing his will to live.

Industry Reviews
"Thus the end of 'Candide' is for me patent proof of a genius of the first water. The claws of the lion are marked on that quiet conclusion, as stupid as life itself."
Norton Critical Edition - Gustave Flaubert (04/24/1852)

"As for novels, Voltaire wrote just one, which is a summary of all his works...His whole intelligence was an implement of war, a weapon. And what makes me cherish him is the disgust I feel for his followers, the Voltaireans, those people who laugh at great things. Did he laugh, himself? He ground his teeth."
Norton Critical Edition - Gustave Flaubert

"Comedy turns sad as soon as it becomes human. Does not 'Don Quixote' sometimes make you grieve? I greatly admire those works of a serene and smiling desolation, like the incomparable 'Don Quixote' or like 'Candide', which are, when properly taken, manuals of indulgence and pity, bibles of benevolence."
Norton Critical Edition - Anatole France

"...Voltaire is like us. The average spirit of France is in him....Voltaire is light, impulsive, a fighter; he is a Frenchman."
Norton Critical Edition - Emile Faguet

"Other cynics astonished the virtuous, Voltaire amazed the vicious. He plunges into filth, roll in it, saturates himself; he yields his imagination to the enthusiasm of hell, which lends all its forces to drag him to the absolute limits of evil. He invents monsters, prodigies which cause one to blench. Paris crowned him, Sodom would have banished him."
Norton Critical Edition - Joseph de Maistre

"He experienced the clarities of dawn. He illuminated the true, the just, the good, and what there is of honesty in the useful. He lit up the interior of superstitions; these ugly sights are good for us to see....to attack the ferocious magistrates and the bloody-minded priests, to take a whip and drive the moneychangers from the temple, to reclaim the heritage of orphans, to protect the weak, the suffering, and the humiliated, to struggle in behalf of the persecuted and the oppressed: that is the war of Jesus Christ. And who is the man who fought that war? It is Voltaire."
Norton Critical Edition - Victor Hugo (05/30/1878)