A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the blogs.
-- Camus

More Kierkegaard (this phrase is on the cover of my - Penguin iirc - edition of Fear and trembling), not so pessimistic if like Kierkegaard you are a Christian, but I don't share Søren's faith so it's fairly brutal to me:

"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?”

I know this is not A Thread for Disagreeing with Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers and I love Kirkegaard but maaaan do I have a bone to pick with that...

My flatmate says, regarding the Cioran quotes and Hitler approval, "If he thought life was meaningless anyway, what good was Nazism going to do?"

Lucky Job, who was not obliged to annotate his lamentations!

- EMC

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history" -- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it.

--Nietzsche

"A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

Schopenhauer again.

That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding dispair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

- Bertrand Russell

"Not to be born is the most to be desired; but having seen the light, the next best thing is to go whence one came as soon as may be"

- Sophocles

"Tormenting human beings with mirrors is more fatal than cracking their head open or sticking a knife in them."

- Scott Conner aka Malefic aka Xasthur

I am living the lie that I am not essentially irrelevant in the larger scheme of things, and days when I wake up thinking about this irrelevance are bad days, and days when I wake up thinking about something else are good days.

― sometimes I pretend I am very huge and icy (kenan), Tuesday, 21 October 2008 00:18 (8 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

<3 this thread

7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

8 All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

-Ecclesiastes

The Septuagint is totally fun and simple to translate, and it's awesome realizing how weird and off the ancient Greek transliteration of the original Hebrew was. I wonder if the statements were originally so profound, or if they became like that through the watering down of language through several transliterations.

Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.

Nabakov: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Nabakov wasn't much of a philosopher - though he had a nice existential turn of phrase e.g 'Laughter in the Dark'

Nietzsche quoting the wisdom of Silenus near the start of the Birth of Tragedy is a doozy that I'm surprised no-one has quoted. Can't remember how it's worded in the book but googling wisdom of Silenus I get this:

“Oh, wretched ephemeral race … why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.”

Also, not a poet, but at the start of Bolano's 2666 he quotes Baudelaire:

"An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom".

Which is pretty pessimistic whichever way you look at it.

There is an old legend that king Midas for a long time hunted the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, in the forests, without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into the king’s hands, the king asked what was the best thing of all for men, the very finest. The daemon remained silent, motionless and inflexible, until, compelled by the king, he finally broke out into shrill laughter and said these words, “Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you the greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this—to die soon.”

― dayo, Tuesday, 14 December 2010 04:46 (11 hours ago)

oh wait, that was done two posts ago hahaha

Mankind is a doomed race in a dying universe. Because the human race will eventually cease to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether it ever did exist. Mankind is thus no more significant than a swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. The same blind cosmic process that coughed them up in the first place will eventually swallow them all again.

still, it's all about the journey not the destination eh

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.” - Luis Bunel.

first sign of memory loss - misseplling ppl's surnames

"People tend to forget how much of their lives are spent tired, hungry, thirsty, in pain and being either too hot or too cold or in need of voiding their bladders and bowels. The same is true of how much time people spend bored, stressed, anxious, fearful, frustrated, irritated, sad, and lonely, to name but a few examples. Also unnoticed is how bad the worst parts of a life are. "

http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1902

"What does follow, I think, from the conclusion that life is not good, is that we should not create more of it. When we bring new people into existence we start more lives that are not good – and we necessarily do this without the permission of those who will live those lives. We have no duty to create new people and failing to create people can do no harm to those we fail to create. Not having children might make our own lives less good, but starting lives that are not good, merely for our own gratification, is unduly selfish."

I'm about ready to jump into a pool of gin and tonic with slit wrists.

― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, September 2, 2011 8:23 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

“A shocking night for Irish football. This side is built to be negative, it’s not capable of creating chances. There’s an element of bankruptcy in this system.”

E. Dunphy

"There’s an element of bankruptcy in this system”

when did dunphy sell out?

You have to allow for Brady sat next to him, to be fair- has been known to get overly-defensive if any project he's been involved in gets criticised.

"Better on your arse than on your feet, Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot."

Beckett!

could fill a thread with beckett, but that's good

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you." -- Gandhi

"Give me death." -- Patrick Henry

"The world is more dangerous than sincere." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did." -- Maya Angelou

"To err is human." -- Alexander Pope

http://kottke.org/11/09/not-so-inspirational-quotes

"The Sweater"

I will lose you. It is written
into this poem the way
the fisherman's wife knits
his death into the sweater.

-Gregory Orr

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves." - the homie big ludwig w.

i like that one

"In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. . . . My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known- no wonder, then, that I return the love." yay, Kirkegaard

"How perfectly goddamned delightful it is, to be sure" -- Charles Crumb.

“In 1965, in his studio in Warsaw, Roman Opałka began painting a process of counting – from one to infinity. The process was endless, but measured against its goal – infinity – it is as naught: ‘the problem is that we are, and are about not to be’.”

http://neversleep2.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/roman-opac582ka-triangulation-blog-3.jpeg?w=422&h=600

http://neversleep2.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/the-problem-is-that-we-are-and-are-about-not-to-be/

^ awesome

"I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals" - George Berkeley

"Perhaps the day may come when we shall remember these sufferings with joy" - Virgil

just because there isn't a thread for 'wry quotes by pessimistic poets'

“your poems about the girls will still be around 50 years from now when the girls are gone,” my editor phones me.

dear editor:
the girls appear to be gone already.

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't exist - Lacan

im pretty sure the people i love exist. that quote was to prove the eternal irrelevance of Lacan, right?

bang

Wow, that's the sort of smug bullshit that you say to seem smart when in fact it just proves you're a complete imbecile incapable of critical thought. Well done.

Well, I wouldn't have put it like that but I guess, yeah, it is. No point saying well done to him though, he died in 1981.

*slow handclap*

To be fair, I like the first part of the quote. It's the second part which confirms what i feel about the hideousness of Lacanian solipsism. But ok, yeah, I spoke out of prejudice.

But then you did the same when you assumed my post was some kind of anti-intellectual screed when it was just express dislike for one dude.