A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

'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

so true

from Sartre's last interview:

With this third world war, which is going to break out one day, with this miserable ensemble that our planet it, despair returns to tempt me again: the idea that we will not ever finish it, there is not any goal, that there are only individual goals for which people struggle. People start small revolutions, but there is not a goal for humanity, there is nothing that interests mankind, there are only disruptions.

dibs on "This Miserable Ensemble" for a future book title.

I was just thinking how half the quotes in here probably have 'miserable' in them; then I read your update, ryan!

I am reminded of Garry Winogrand's Guggenheim app:

I look at the pictures I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and what we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have become cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at the magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life. I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and further.

'We have not loved life' will be my future book title

from an interview with stanley elkin:

In a New York Times review, Josh Greenfield said that you seem to write with the conviction that the world is winless. Do you agree with this?

Yes, well, we all die, yes? We suffer, correct? The score keeps changing, is it not so? And Mommy holds us on the teeter-totter before we can sit upright on chairs. I don;t really care so much about the fact that the world is winless. It is simply a condition that seems true to me. It is just a condition the way a red light is a condition at a traffic crossing. Yet, quite marvelous books have been written about winner worlds. Other people write them.

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.”
Cioran

Winogrand's conclusion is kinda profound in that Beckettian "I can't go on, I'll go on" kind of way. Similarly, there's another part of the Sartre interview (later on apparently, I'm quoting from another source), where he says, quite movingly,

The world seems ugly, bad, and without hope. That is the tranquil despair of an old man who will die within it. But that is precisely what I resist, and I know that I will die in hope; but it is necessary to create a foundation for this hope.

I've always liked this quote from the Dao De Jing (more familiar perhaps as the Tao Te Ching):

Heaven and Earth are not humane*
They regard all things as straw dogs**

*Most translations have this as inhumane. I think that's inaccurate because it ascribes a degree of intentional malevolence to Heaven/Earth (here understood as the world external to human perception). The point is not that the world is cruel; just indifferent, ahumane in the sense of amorality, etc., without a sense of good and evil or any other sense of moral epistemology

**Yes, this is the passage that the movie Straw Dogs got its name from

i like that bit, don't find it pessimistic either. it can be liberating.

This one from Adorno is a little bit out of context but i think you can follow it:

But since, in a world whose law is universal individual profit, the individual has nothing but this self that has become indifferent, the performance of the old, familiar tendency is at the same time the most dreadful of things. There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electrified barbed wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But is is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

where's that from, ryan? (thanks for posting)

towards the end of Negative Dialectics. striking passage even in context.

-Sometimes I look up at the stars and analyse the sky and I ask myself if I'm meant to be here, why.

― Raccoon Tanuki

Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet, bedridden and utterly forgotten, who in a rage with his contemporaries declared he would receive none of them. His wife, out of charity, wold ring at the door from time to time. ...

Cioran

Now that's a goddamn ZING

yowwwww

Been reading some Schopenhauer, who is great (except when writing about women, about who he is a complete fuckwit).

“The appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be not monsieur or sir, but fellow sufferer, companion in misery."

"[...] it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing." - Tao Lin

meh

Sarcastic framing is a perfectly good reason to form a square.

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is the image of the human condition.

except, as a devout catholic, pascal only said that as the preliminary softening up jab before delivering his real convictions, that the death sentence could be commuted by god and all that anguish allayed to joy

religion and (worldly) pessimism go hand-in-hand.

it's not for nothing that so many of those quoted on this thread are quite critical of Enlightenment (ie, secular) derived ideals of human perfectibility.

Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet, bedridden and utterly forgotten, who in a rage with his contemporaries declared he would receive none of them. His wife, out of charity, wold ring at the door from time to time. ...
Cioran

― 龜, Wednesday, 11 March 2015 21:02 (Yesterday) Permalink

Strangely I actually find this quote kind of optimistic.

except, as a devout catholic, pascal only said that as the preliminary softening up jab before delivering his real convictions, that the death sentence could be commuted by god and all that anguish allayed to joy

Pascal was a devout Catholic, but he was sympathetic to Jansenism (very anti-Jesuit) and Augustinian, i.e. had a very profound sense of original sin and the futility of "free will." Salvation (granted by God only to some) was utterly dependent on God's grace (unmerited)-- in Pascal the prospect of salvation has something absurd and (as it were) kafkaesque about it. Ryan otm that this pessimism is "critical of Enlightenment (ie, secular) derived ideals of human perfectibility." But even whatever metaphysical consolation there is in Pascal, is a gamble against the odds-- not very comforting at all.

One thing about great pessimists, they're great aphorists. Maybe if I give up all hope I'll write better sentences.

good aphorists, like good pessimists, certainly do not say 'maybe'.

alas