#Books on optimism how to#
#Books on optimism full#

The result is that no matter which path you take, you are almost guaranteed a life filled with struggle and pain: “to experience all the miseries through which every one of us has passed, or to remain here doing nothing?” Those who retreat will eventually resent their idleness, and vice and greed will eventually overtake them, and consume their thoughts until they destroy themselves in a similar manner not dissimilar to those in power. Those who struggle for power will eventually falter, and embark on a perilous fall at the hands of the ambitious comeupants who the powerful once embodied themselves. One can either struggle, strive, reach for greatness, for power and your place at the top, or one can retreat from the world, living free but with no greater purpose to guide them. For the bulk of the book, Voltaire presents two basic approaches to life.

#Books on optimism how to#

At a deeper glance, Candide is a story on how to live a good life amongst this depravity. Yet despite this knowledge, we hunger, and continue to struggle against our own species.īut that is just the surface. We fight wars on the behalf of peace and church, put our fellow man in chains, and let our desire for money shade all of our thoughts and actions, while any man of means will readily tell you that they are no happier with their money than they were before. It also poses as a satire of human emotions, stating that we do little in this world that makes any sense, though we view ourselves as the superior form of intelligence.

In short, it is a complete disavowal of religion, government, and most philosophy.

#Books on optimism full#

The book follows the adventures of it’s main character Candide, a naive young man driven from his home, and determined to overcome all the obstacles and hardships he faces in his quest to be re-united with the woman he views as the love of his life.Īt surface level, the theme of the narrative is on the evil nature of the world that instead of a world full of meaning and purpose, it is full of cruel probabilities, one in which very little happens for any purpose at all, good or bad.

The next step in my 2018 reading agenda to cover as many as the classic books of Western thought as I can brought me to the short, satirical novel Candide (subtitled with just a drop of wit as Optimism ), written by French Enlightenment thinker Voltaire around 1759, just before the rumblings of Revolution began to build over the pond in America.