Candide

LIFE IS WORTH LIVING

Voltaire earned much fame and criticism at the same time for his powerful crusade against injustice and bigotry, expressed in brilliant literature. He went up against the government and the Catholic hierarchy, particularly because of the Grand Inquisition. His character, Candide, was very much patterned after his own personality and experience, but his character begins by believing in goodness as prevailing in the world and ends the same way, despite his (Voltaire's) deadly cynicism. His famous phrase, "the best of possible worlds," has been his landmark, and the question that follows is, "what then are the others?"

He was the satirist par excellence of his time and considered the embodiment of the Enlightenment Period in the 18th century. A mix of success and suffering characterized his whole life, from poor health, to the disapproval of authorities, imprisonments and exiles, but more significantly, his achieving much...
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