Better Never to Have Been Quotes

“It is good that existers enjoy their pleasures. It is also good that pains are avoided through non-existence. However, that is only part of the picture. Because there is nothing bad about never coming into existence, but there is something bad about coming into existence, it seems that all things considered non-existence is preferable.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand! Jewish saying”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things. The implication of this is that the avoidance of the bad by never existing is a real advantage over existence, whereas the loss of certain goods by not existing is not a real disadvantage over never existing.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“So I have praised the dead that are already dead more than the living that are yet alive; but better than both of them is he who has not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“Many readers will be inclined to dismiss my arguments and will do so too hastily. When rejecting an unpopular view, it is extraordinarily easy to be overly confident in the force of one's responses. This is partly because there is less felt need to justify one's views when one is defending an orthodoxy. It is also partly because counter-responses from those critical of this orthodoxy, given their rarity, are harder to anticipate.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“absent pleasures are not bad”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“absent pleasures are not bad.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“One has to seek out pleasurable sensations, in the absence of which blandness comes naturally. The upshot of this is that we must continually work at keeping suffering (including tedium) at bay, and we can do so only imperfectly. Dissatisfaction does and must pervade life. There are moments, perhaps even periods, of satisfaction, but they occur against a background of dissatisfied striving.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“Many will be tempted to assess the quality of a life simply by subtracting the disvalue of life’s negative features from the value of its positive features. That is to say, they will assign values to quad-rants (1) and (2) in my schema, and then subtract the latter from the former. However, this way of determining a life’s quality is far too simplistic.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the non-existent. Only existers suffer harm.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“coming into existence, far from ever constituting a net benefit, always constitutes a net harm.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“Indeed, I would claim more suicides to be rational than would the common view. In many cultures (including most western cultures), there is immense prejudice against suicide. It is often viewed as cowardly where it is not dismissed as a consequence of mental illness. My view allows the possibility that suicide may more often be rational and may even be more rational than continuing to exist.This is because it may be an irrational love for life that keeps many people alive when their lives have actually become so bad that ceasing to exist would be better. This is the view expressed by the old woman in Voltaire’s Candide:
A hundred times I wished to kill myself, but my love of life persisted. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of the most fatal of our faults.
For what could be more stupid than to go on carrying a burden that we always long to lay down? To loathe, and yet cling to, existence? In short, to cherish the serpent that devours us, until it has eaten our hearts?”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“Just as absent pleasures that do deprive are ‘bad’ in the sense of ‘worse’, so absent pleasures that do not deprive are ‘not bad’ in the sense of ‘not worse’.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence