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"Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst."
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Explore more quotes by Voltaire
"Shall I not render a service to men in speaking to them only of morality? This morality is so pure, so holy, so universal, so clear, so ancient, that it seems to come from God himself, like the light which we regard as the first of his works. Has he not given men self-love to secure their preservation; benevolence, beneficence, and virtue to control their self-love; the natural need to form a society; pleasure to enjoy, pain to warn us to enjoy in moderation, passions to spur us to great deeds, and wisdom to curb our passions?"
"Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another."
"Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats."
"He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors."
"I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?"
Exlpore more Perspective quotes
"The wealth of time is the only wealth that is more valuable than human resources."
"It's good to look at life from the bottom up so you can see that things have risen above what they once were."
"You can look at the world from a mountain or from a rat hole! Most people do the second!"
"A muddied diamond is better than an unsullied pebble."
"The Protestants teachings affected the view of the populace to work."
"It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos, for man was always small compared to the nearest tree."
"We have a choice. We can be jaded by what we've lost, or joyous over what that thing had accomplished while we had it."
"It is good to focus, but never forget to look around. If you focus on the wrong target, you may miss seeing all of the beauty around you."
"Write it as you see in your own perspective, you may be right or wrong but then what, that's how you see it."
"Life is full of beauty, when we focus on the bliss of being."
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