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Candide

I've wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but I still love life. That ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most pernicious inclinations. What could be more stupid than to persist in carrying a burden that we constantly want to cast off, to hold our existence in horror, yet cling to it nonetheless, to fondle the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten our hearts?

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'[I]s there not pleasure in criticizing, in finding faults where other men think they see beauty?'

'That is to say,' said Martin, 'that there is pleasure in not being pleased.'

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'What's optimism?'

'Alas, it's a mania for insisting that everything is all right when everything is going wrong.'

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'Do you believe that men have always slaughtered each other as they do today, that they've always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates and thieves, weak, fickle, cowardly, envious, greedy, drunken, miserly, ambitious, bloodthirsty, slanderous, lecherous, fanatical, hypocritical and foolish?'

'Do you believe that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they find them?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Well, then, if hawks have always had the same character, what makes you think men have changed theirs?'

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