A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

Nazism, Cioran wrote, possessed "greatness." Germans had a "need for a Führer," and Hitlerism constituted "a destiny for Germany." Cioran supported a similar dictatorship for his country and believed that "only terror, brutality, and endless anxiety are likely to bring about a change in Romania. All Romanians should be arrested and beaten to a pulp; this is the only way a shallow nation could make a name for itself." "Hitler's merit," insisted the young voice of vitalist barbarism, "consists in depriving his nation of a critical spirit."

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=xzm8107fnyrw9nnrr3p3cwbm3mc04n21

-sorry, everyone :(

"It is the worst of all possible worlds ... if it were a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds."

"There is no doubt that life is given to us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome - to be got over."

--Cyril Connolly

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth. Look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity. Then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

Of course, he has plenty of optimistic ones, too:

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

ANON

Dolphins, you play in the sea,
But the waves are always bitter.
Do I sometimes laugh with joy?
Life is still cruel.

OMG I used to have a woodcut print that had this poem (in french) with it. I don't think I knew it was Apollinaire, but I always loved it.

No Adorno quotes?

"Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"

God, I need to read a Cioran book!

I'm so glad there's some Nietzsche up in this bitch.

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

most of these make lawl none moreso than this

"The way in which we have spent the afternoon is so vile, we ought not to go on living."

Wittgenstein, after attending a rowing regatta with Russell.

otm, rowing events are the worst

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