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1759

Showing 26 works across all media from 1759

Fiction · Picaresque

Candide

Voltaire
1759 · 336 pages

Voltaire sends an innocent young man taught that this is the best of all possible worlds through war, earthquake, and the Inquisition. The comedy is savage and the optimism does not survive.

★ 8.2
Novel · Satire

All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; for, after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunégonde, if you hadn’t been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios.

Voltaire
Candide · 1759
★ 3.7
Philosophical literature

Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations... His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.

Adam Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments · 1759
★ 2.0
Philosophical literature

The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice overrates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vainglory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires.

Adam Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments · 1759
★ 2.0
Philosophical literature

In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than here and there a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded by his own candour from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily upon that very account one of the most insignificant men in the society.

Adam Smith
The Theory of Moral Sentiments · 1759
★ 1.2