A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

that's awesome. i have never seen it before.

I always had a soft spot for Cioran's "I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him"

Such despairing pessimism had, as is often the case, profound roots in childhood. The prosperous country town of Rasinari in Saxon Transylvania seemed like an earthly paradise to the little boy. His father was the orthodox priest of the place, and Cioran loved the cemetery where he made friends with the gravedigger who would give him skulls to play football with.

is there a correlation between paradisiacal childhoods and adult-onset extreme pessimism?

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release. For hours and hours I would walk the night’s deserted streets, or, sometimes, those haunted by my fellow-insomniacs, the prostitutes, the ideal companions in moments of supreme distress. Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture . . . It was during those infernal nights that I came to understand the inanity of all philosophy. The hours without sleep are at bottom an interminable rejection of thought by thought itself . . . an infernal ultimatum of the mind delivered to the mind.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/05f1200bdf1335f33b915fb5619b274d/tumblr_mqcvru8bfJ1qzywvpo1_500.png

lol @ cruel shoes in the corner

is that as close as we'll ever get to a nilmar honorato da silva wdyll

God, I need to read a Cioran book!

― Tape Store, Sunday, August 26, 2007 6:29 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

Bertand Russell

wow

oh hi july 2013

"For once you must face the facts / Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts." - Brecht

*high-fives bertrand russell*

dr morbius that's only pessimistic if you're religious iirc

nevermind i may be misreading brecht

admittedly I don't exactly find it pessimistic; just the facts, ma'am

berkeley is way upthread talking about being an oyster, but he does not really belong here. He is cool with not being an oyster because he is immortal:

there is not any property or circumstance of my being that I contemplate with more joy than my immortality. I can easily overlook any present momentary sorrow, when I reflect that it is in my power to be happy a thousand years hence. If it were not for this thought, I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals, than a reasonable mind tortured with an extreme innate desire of that perfection which it despairs to obtain.

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”
― Georges Bataille

ha! Nice one.

On that note came across a characteristically obscure one from Lacan:

"Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subjects desire."

Translation: wanting something is constitutive of not getting it.

:C

lacan is pretty brutally pessimistic but i think he is unfortunately right about dissatisfaction being built into the structure of desire.

lacan way overqualified for that idea

"the grass is always greener on the other side" - jacques lacan

the bataille quote is basically like we are only desire, we have nothing else to offer, and it melts us like the ark of the covenant in indiana jones. love bataille

i love the phrasing of it: "you perhaps now know..."

"In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

-- Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE5tVOGYnmI

ahahahaha

nilmz yer a bloody poet

'nilmz' would turn the happiest philosopher into another cioran imo

I'm a little ways into Cioran's The Temptation to Exist and there's something quite liberating about his all-encompassing negativity / contrarianism. If all possible routes to happiness or fulfillment or self-actualization are all fatally flawed (to varying degrees, as he so eloquently argues), then all that's left is to embrace our failures as cherished things. (Doubtless Cioran would loathe this interpretation, bless 'im.)

There's a bit somewhere where he talks about the "salvation of no salvation," so he may be more keen on that idea than you'd think.

http://www.full-stop.net/2014/01/15/blog/ericjesse/6-illustrated-quotes-by-e-m-cioran/

Those are amazing, and is it wrong I'd want to hang them on my walls?

(or better yet make mine own versions)

haha i tell myself the one about imposters quite a lot. a decent salve for social anxiety!

Really feeling these, I need to find and read some of this guy, because those aphorisms make me smile so much, because, yeah, you *get* it, man.

Cioran makes me laugh a lot--in agreement! Schopenhauer is wickedly funny too.

Not a philosopher per se, but think this fits here:

"Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying." - Marcel Proust, The Fugitive

what kind of code modifications would need to be made for this thread to be locked during february

I teach a 10 year-old boy in a big house in Kensington. He's a science prodigy; he asks me questions about quantum physics, grasps concepts such as gravitational wave-bending, singularities and spacetime. He's always cheerful.

He was recently set by his school a timed creative essay with the assigned title 'The Deserted Train Station'.

I now repeat this essay, verbatim.

***

My mind is a web of ideas and thoughts. But if you were to go into the deepest part of the deepest maze of my brain you would find yourself in a deserted train station. No word has ever been spoken there. It's like a cage of thoughtlessness in a world of thought. It's traping me from my destiny.

No train has ever come, dust is everywhere the smell of sadness and emotion filled the air with an unforgiving stench. If you dare to disturb the silence you would come out meaningless like a voice trying to be heard, but rejected in utter distaste. My life felt like a mistake. I felt worthless.

You would see a room with no coulour and when you look in a mirror you would see your greatest fear. There would be no exit and no hope. Hope for freedom.

Inside the train station time wouldn't move as if the second hand was afraid, afraid of the world and life. The rooms walls are made of guilt, the roof of meaningless and the floor was made of disaster.

Maybe I'm at the wrong train station. Maybe I wasn't meant to be here. Is that why the train doesn't come? I wonder when will my train come?

Wow.

undue influence imo

As you point out, this kid is very quick to absorb and master ideas. The fact that he can skillfully manipulate this imagery does not imply that these are more than a mimicry of existential angst, trying it on like a suit of clothes to see how they might feel. Very impressive, though. And he may well have some firsthand understanding of alienation at that age, given his differences from the norm.

he wrote a hit post

"Cage of thoughtlessness in a world of thought" is almost like a Buddhist koan (though in that case thought would be the cage I suppose).

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?

"There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books."

Not a philosopher, and better in context, but:
"There's some wine left in the bottle. You drink it. The clock ticks. Sleep. . . . People care about the happy life, but that's the happy life when you don't care any longer if you live or die. You only get there after a long time and many misfortunes. And do you think you are left there? Never.
"As soon as you have reached this heaven of indifference, you are pulled out of it. From your heaven you have to go back to hell. When you are dead to the world, the world often rescues you, if only to make a figure of fun out of you."
(Jean Rhys, "Good Morning, Midnight")

http://i.imgur.com/TlHQT7r.gif