A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

so i was wrong

you would have regretted not making that post

at least that regret would have been contained to my own self ;_;

now everyone regrets it. forgot to mention that part, Søren.

:)

(you forget that misery loves company)

into both those quotes

"let's drink til our hearts stop" - space ghost

“There are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.”

Kinda comforting, to me anyway. I hate decisions a lot, it's nice to know they don't matter.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFDtjGfW8AIIgnU.png

OTM

just some chill buddhism

If a bear ever charges me and pins me down, I swear I'll look him in the eye and say, "you're right to do this, we're a vile species" before he starts eating my face.

― #HipsterTroll has been blocked. #BringItOn (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Sunday, May 17, 2015 12:15 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

coming soon, eugene thacker tries to contribute to the canon:
http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Pessimism-Univocal-Eugene-Thacker/dp/193756147X/

http://defamer.gawker.com/a-kendall-kylie-interview-so-good-i-literally-want-to-1708536577

Kendall had an epiphany about social media on a recent family holiday to Thailand. “We had a two-hour drive from the airport to where we were staying, and I’d left my phone in my bag, so I didn’t touch it the whole way. I looked out the window at everything, and I saw people who live in huts and have dogs that were, like, withering away. And all their food, meat, was hanging in front of their house. It was very sad.

iirc schopenhauer had much the same experience on his grand tour

Someone needs to turn these into FB macros

Not to be born is best
when all is reckoned in, but once a man has seen the light
the next best thing, by far, is to go back
back where he came from, quickly as he can.
For once his youth slips by, light on the wing
lightheaded… what mortal blows can he escape
what griefs won’t stalk his days?
Envy and enemies, rage and battles, bloodshed
and last of all despised old age overtakes him,
stripped of power, companions, stripped of love—
the worst this life of pain can offer,
old age our mate at last.

myth of silenus?

expressed by chorus in oedipus @ colonus
echoing, yes, the wisdom of silenus

https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xft1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/11351316_882616678478374_2959348984621827832_n.jpg?oh=6571456239eb5f3735bc5b7102246f3e&oe=55F84A24

let's make the best of the situation before i finally go insane

- eric clapton

http://i.imgur.com/re0GCuv.png

http://40.media.tumblr.com/04216a3895b907eacb0d84c90e99e345/tumblr_nqhba4aomV1rodhzko1_1280.jpg

perfect w/ cheerful av photo

"The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion, each of which winds itself upon the supreme insanity that there are persons of any kind, when all that can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream."
-- Thomas Ligotti, or at least TL's words delivered by David Tibet. https://youtu.be/lxZpEFJhO6k

I'm most displeased that the homemade video for this that I once saw on vimeo is no longer there. It was a miracle.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/10/us/universe-dying/index.html?sr=cnnifb

The conclusion of a new astronomical study pulls no punches on this. "The Universe is slowly dying," it reads.

Astronomers have believed as much for years, but the new findings establish the cosmos' decline with unprecedented precision.

I liked this quote from the Charting the Slow Death of the Universe

"The Universe will decline from here on in, sliding gently into old age. The Universe has basically sat down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze,” concludes Simon Driver.

Since we're quoting news reports today:

On average, the effect of a new baby on a person's life is devastatingly bad — worse than divorce, worse than unemployment and worse even than the death of a partner.

lol that's great

but is it worse than marriage?

Sloterdijk, "Rules for the Human Zoo"

Two thousand years after Plato wrote it seems as if not only gods but the wise have abandoned us, and left us alone with our partial knowledge and our ignorance. What is left to us in the place of the wise is their writings, in their glinting brilliance and their increasing obscurity. They still lay in more or less accessible editions; they can still be read, if only one knew why one should bother. It is their fate--to stand in silent bookshelves, like posted letters no longer collected, sent to us by authors, of whom we no longer know whether or not they could be our friends.

allows the possibility of authors being friends; too optimistic

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one. - Mignon McLaughlin

― mayhaps, Friday, May 11, 2007 9:17 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nice one--missed it the first time I read this thread.

Have been inspired to put half a dozen of these quotes into an email entitled 'Friday Funnies' and send it round the office.

Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity

The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.

Thomas Bernhard: “The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.”

The Jacques Monod quote doesn't seem that pessimistic to me.

Monod (a biochemist by trade) also believed that evolution of complex, intelligent life was so unlikely that we're likely the only ones. So our solitude is absolute.

http://nihilisa-frank.tumblr.com

Claude Levi-Strauss:

To establish a correlation between the emergence of writing and certain characteristic features of civilization, we must look in a quite different direction. The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, at any rate, is the typical patter of development to be observed from Egypt to China, at the time when writing first emerged: it seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment ... My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery. The use of writing for disinterested purposes, and as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, is a secondary result, and more often than not it may even be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying or concealing the other.

love that tumblr

here's one from an anguished cosmologist

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

http://www.sns.ias.edu/pitp2/2011files/PhysRevD.21.3305.pdf

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/0DDCEADD-CC33-4C29-B97D-5AC5E0AFB694_zpsjz2zhamg.jpg

^^ so into this

is it really worth starting a new thread? all these sites die eventually

― Cosmic Slop, Sunday, 20 September 2015 00:05 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

"We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence." -- more Cioran

https://66.media.tumblr.com/c627ef171c430ef153db578ba403632f/tumblr_oae9r1xqjw1qgktofo1_540.png

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.

He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.

Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.

That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

Peter Wessel Zappfe, The Last Messiah

A charmed life is so rare that for every one such life there are millions of wretched lives. Some know that their baby will be among the unfortunate. Nobody knows, however, that their baby will be one of the allegedly lucky few. Great suffering could await any person that is brought into existence. Even the most privileged people could give birth to a child that will suffer unbearably, be raped, assaulted, or be murdered brutally. The optimist surely bears the burden of justifying this procreational Russian roulette. Given that there are no real advantages over never existing for those who are brought into existence, it is hard to see how the significant risk of serious harm could be justified. If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring.

Pat David Benatar