Voltaire

Candide Voltaire

When you want to read in both German and English, though, there's a great option: bilingual books! Reading bilingual books and inferring the vocabulary and grammar is a far superior method of language learning than traditional memorization. It is also much less painful. Candide, ou l'Optimisme, is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: Optimism (1947). It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not rejecting Leibnizian optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we must cultivate our garden," in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds." François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 - 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on Christianity as a whole, especially the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and separation of church and state.