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#1

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.”
― Franz Kafka

tags: pessimism, philosophy

63 likes

#2

“And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that they were all ascending, moving into a future that could only improve them, and I wondered what it was like - the miracle, the stupidity of feeling that.”
― Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

tags: depression, pessimism

22 likes

#3

“Depressed, negative, and pessimistic people were often treated like lepers in this world. It was as though people feared catching what they had. Perhaps because what they were saying made sense? Hell, if everybody would see the world as it truly was, we’d all be depressed. But if that were the case, there wouldn’t even be any people. For nobody would want to bring a child into this fucked up world if they truly understood the sorry state of things. The fact that we kept on breeding showed that delusion was necessary for the continuation of the species.”
― Keijo Kangur, The Nihilist

tags: antinatalism, delusion, depression, pessimism

14 likes

#4

“I rejoice that I could once think better of the world's improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice, in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can magnanimously persist in error.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

tags: disillusionment, nihilism, optimism, pessimism, reformism

3 likes

#5

“The sea with its perpetual oscillation, that obstinate swell sweeping up to the cliffs twice a day, exasperated him: it was senseless force, indifferent to his grief, wearing down the same rocks for centuries while never mourning the death of a single human being. it was too vast, too cold; and he would hurry home and shut himself indoors, to feel less insignificant, less crushed between the dual infinities of sea and sky.”
― Émile Zola, The Bright Side of Life

tags: pessimism, the-sea, zola

4 likes

#6

“And when I think my thinking rouses me to blame he who created me, And I gave peace to my children for they are in the bliss of the abyss
Which surpasses all the pleasures of the world,
And had they been born they would’ve endured misery”
― Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, The Quatrains of Abu'l-Ala: Selected From His "Lozum-Ma-La-Yalzam" And "Sact-Uz-Zind" And Now First Translated Into English

tags: antinatalism, childfree, parents, pessimism

13 likes

#7

“In all our actions, including those that appear selfless, we are in search of some kind of pleasure, even if it is only the pleasure of self-esteem. But while our desire for pleasure is infinite, our mental and physical organs are capable only of limited and temporary pleasures; and this mismatch between desire and capacity dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction. There is no pleasure big or total enough to quench, even momentarily, our thirst for pleasure. But since the absence of pleasure is pain, it follows that we are always in pain, even when we might believe otherwise. And if life is nothing but an unbroken experience of pain, it would be better for every human being never to have been born.”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

tags: antinatalism, childfree, pessimism, philosophy

18 likes

#8

“Parenthood is some people’s subconscious revenge for having been brought into existence without their consent.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: antinatalism, childhood, children, family, natalism, parenthood, parenting, pessimism, procreation, reproduction

8 likes

#9

“Habitual excuses for inactivity indicates little or no interest in what one ought to have done.”
― Itohan Eghide, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

tags: alibi, apology, cover, coverup, curiosity, depression, done, enthusiasm, excuses, habit, interest, laziness, leisure, lethargy, lifeless, lifelessness, moment, pessimism, pursuit, rationalization, reason, story

6 likes

#10

“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.”
― Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

tags: abject, abjectness, abominable, charms, chaste, chastity, death, distance, dream, empty, emptyness, eternal, existence, heaven, hope, hopelessness, ignoble, imagination, kiss, kisses, life, love, pale, pessimism, pessimist, possess, skeptic, skepticism, unreal, world

26 likes

#11

“Rut, routine, robotic. These are the three R's of adult-hood. Wake up, eat, go to work, eat, work more, come home, eat, sleep, and repeat every day until we all reach retirement, or death.”
― Craig R. Key, Counting Losses

tags: pessimism, pessimist, pessimistic, work, work-ethic, working

5 likes

#12

“To claim that one can never live a positive life with a negative mind is a very negative claim to make!”
― Criss Jami, Healology

tags: constructive-criticism, criticism, doubt, faith, funny, funny-but-true, grace, hope, humor, hypocrisy, life, mercy, mind, negativity, optimism, pessimism, positivity, realist, success, thoughts

2 likes

#13

“There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

tags: boredom, dead-people, dead-souls, death, death-and-dying, death-wish, depression, despair, discontent, emptiness, empty-life, empty-soul, existential-crisis, fulfilling-life, fulfilling-your-destiny, fulfilling-your-potential, fulfillment, hopeless, hopelessness, lack-of-ambition, life-and-death, life-and-living, life-philosophy, living-dead, meaningful-living, meaninglessness, meaninglessness-of-life, pessimism, procrastination, self-pity, zest-for-life

26 likes

#14

“Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

tags: bitterness, hatred, pessimism

12 likes

#15

“I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.”
― Anna Kavan, Asylum Piece

tags: enemy, fatalism, fate, pessimism

13 likes

#16

“Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?”
― Émile Zola, The Joy of Life

tags: life, pessimism, regrets, zola

40 likes

#17

“Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend it reflecting on it.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans

tags: life, pessimism

30 likes

#18

“Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist - life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for.”
― N.C. Thomas, Brand

tags: humourous, pessimism, realism

9 likes

#19

“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.”
― Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

tags: fiction, on-fiction, pessimism, reality

133 likes

#20

“Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some smaller countries are neutral. ”
― Robert Orben

tags: pessimism

93 likes

#21

“For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn't work.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction

tags: future, pessimism

3 likes

#22

“Thinking based on evil is not pessimistic; it is the thinking based on misfortune that is pessimistic because it wants desperately to escape evil or, alternatively, to revel in it.
Thought, for its part, does not cure human misfortune, the terrible obviousness of which it absorbs for purposes of some unknown transformation. Pessimism excludes any depth that eludes its negative judgement, whereas thought wishes to penetrate magically beyond the fracture of the visible. The rays of the black sun of pessimism do not reach down to the floor of the abyss.
Absolute depth knows neither good nor evil.
Thus the intelligence of evil goes far beyond pessimism.
In reality, the only genuinely pessimistic, nihilistic vision is that of good since, at bottom, from the humanist point of view, the whole of history is nothing but crime. Cain killing Abel is already a crime against humanity (there were only two of them!) and isn't original sin already a crime against humanity too? This is all absurd, and, from the standpoint of good, the effort to rehabilitate the world's violence is a hopeless exercise. All the more so as, without all these crimes, there simply wouldn't be any history.
'If the evil in man were eliminated,' says Montaigne, 'you would destroy the fundamental conditions of life.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

tags: evil, nihilism, optimism, pessimism, thought

1 likes

#23

“...he sat down in the chair and went over in his mind everything that in the past week or so had filled his cup of bitter sorrows and dark memories to overflowing.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

tags: alexandre-dumas, pessimism, the-count-of-monte-cristo, tragedy

2 likes

#24

“What is repulsive about children - all children - is not that they are not yet adults, but that they are already adults - whining, self-absorbed, demanding attention, unable to care for themselves, throwing tantrums when things don't go their way. Far from what we tell ourselves, children are the most concise expressions of humanity. At least children are unaware of this.”
― Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation

tags: anti-humanism, children, pessimism

4 likes

#25

“A horribly bitter taste came into his mouth: the futility of everything, the eternal pain of existence.”
― Émile Zola

tags: nihilism, pessimism

9 likes

#26

“Lei, disse, era cattolico, vero?
No.
Anglicano?
No. Sono esistenzialista.
Davvero? Ma, uh… io parlavo di… religione.
Lo so. Anch’io.
Be’, ma… non credo di aver mai sentito parlare di questa setta. È nuova?
Non proprio.
Chi l’ha fondata?
Un danese, un certo Kierkegaard.
E credono nel potere di redenzione di Gesù Cristo?
Kierkegaard di sicuro ci credeva.”
― Colin Wilson, Ritual in the Dark

tags: colin-wilson, occult, pessimism

1 likes

#27

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

210 likes

#28

“Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.”
― Emil Cioran

tags: revenge

74 likes

#29

“Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

tags: determinism, free-will, idealism, pessimism

814 likes

#30

“The person you are mad at for being late could be late.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

tags: death, late, meeting, pessimism, punctual, punctuality, stoicism, time, traffic, traffic-jam

1 likes

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