A Thread for Posting Brutally Pessimistic Quotes by Anguished Philosophers

-- Latham Green (pennyson...), January 12th, 2006.

"Kuhns ideas are interesting but, alas, they are much too vauge to give rise to anything but lots of hot air. If you don't believe me, look at the literature. Never before has the literature on the philosophy of science been invaded by so many creeps and incompetents.

Kuhn encourages people who have no idea why a stone falls to the ground to talk with assurance about scientific method. Now I have no objection to incompetence but I do object when incompetence is accompanied by boredom and self-righteousness. And this is exactly what happens."

EMC is my new hero.

"Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition."

I like how Cioran chose not to write, becaue it was, well, correct me if i am wrong, a violation to his desire for nothingness.

But mayve Cioran was just sad and lazy.

"When two people fall in love and suspect they are made for each other, the thing is to have the courage to break it off, for by continuing they have everything to lose and nothing to gain."

Same!

"One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness, two of barrenness, and three of sodomy."
Edward Dahlberg

(hee hee wtf?)

(not a movie fan, i guess.)

"So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born."
Edward Dahlberg

"Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy."
Edward Dahlberg

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1559704624/103-4204161-6047800?v=glance&n=283155

Ha ha! Me too.

The Mouse

Beautiful days, mice of time,
Bit by bit you gnaw my life away.
God! Soon I will have lived
Twenty-eight years, and badly.

The Carp

Carp, how long you live
In your crowded pools!
Fish of melancholy,
Does death forget you?

The Octopus

Spraying his ink toward heaven,
Sucking the blood from those he loves,
And finding it delicious:
This inhuman monster is myself.

The Dolphin

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

The Lion

O lion, unhappy image
Of sadly fallen kings,
You are born now in a cage,
In Hamburg, among the Germans.

What makes this band different from The Magnetic Fields is that any glimmer of hope is absolutely extinguished.
-- The Gothic Archies

Alas, the door of fortune does not open inwards so that one can force it by charging at it; it opens outwards and so there is nothing one can do.

The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory.

How empty life is and without meaning. We bury a man, we follow him to the grave, we throw three spades of earth on him, we ride out in a coach, we ride home in a coach, we take comfort in the thought that a long life awaits us. But how long is threescore years and ten? Why not finish it at once? Why not stay out there and step down into the grave with him, and draw lots for who should have the misfortune to be the last alive to throw the last three spades of earth on the last of the dead?

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosopher-failure-emil-ciorans-heights-despair/

^^^haven't read that yet, but figured good or bad it was worth posting here.

oh yes, choice quotes in there.

“Before being a fundamental mistake, life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.”

the gods take no thought for our happiness. only for our punishment.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2pcxo3XUAEF32S.jpg:small

-- bob marley seneca

stoicism is not pessimism!!!

More context for Seneca, Natural Questions Book III, 29.5-10:

So whenever the end of human history arrives, when the earth's parts have to perish and all be utterly destroyed, in order that primitive, innocent people may be created afresh and no teacher of worse behavior may survive, then more liquid will be produced than there has ever been before. For at present the elements are weighted out ous required. One of them needs to be increased so that an imbalance may upset the current equilibium. Water will be increased: for now there is enough to encircle the land, but not to cover it; whatever you add to it must overflow into alien territory.
So consider whether the earth does not also need to be diminished, so that the weaker may succumb to the stronger. So it will begin to decay, thent to decompose and turn to liquid, and to dissolve into a steady stream of putrefaction. Then rivers will spring up beneath mountains and make them crumble under the onslaught.
Then fields that are affected become soddon; the the ground will exude water; the mountaintops will bubble over. Just as healthy parts become diseased, and an ulcer spreads to adjacent areas, so the regions closed to land that is already awash will themselves dissolve and forme a trickle, then a fast current; then, as rocks gape apart all over the place, they will rush through the channels and join up all the seas. The Adriatic will be no more, nor the strats of the Sicilian sea, nor Charybdis, nor Scylla. The new sea will overwhelm all those myths, and the ocean that now encyrcles the land, assigned to its outer edges, will reach the center. What happens next? Winter will cling on to the months that do not belong to it, summer will be kept out, and all the heavenly bodies that dry up the earth will fade away, with their heat suppressed. So many famous names will disappear, the Caspian and Red seas, the Ambracian and Cretan gulfs, the Propontis and the Black Sea, when that deluge spreads a single sea over everything. All distinctions will disappear; everything that has its own place assigned by nature will be mixed together. No one will be protected by city walls or by towers. Temples will be no use to worshippers, nor the highest points of cities, for the waves will overtake them and pull them down even from the citadels.
Waters will converge from the west and from the east. A single day will bury the human race. All that fortune's indulgence has fostered for so long, all it has elevated above the rest, the noble and the honored alike, and the kingdoms of great nations, all will be sent to the bottom.

(typos all mine)

Anyway, Jerry Bruckheimer, 1st century style.

dunked right in fukuyama's jaw

sluices for douches

Still doesn't sound that pessimistic, he seems comforted by all that.

that's a beautiful passage.

(it is interesting to consider how something like stoicism or other pre-modern forms of wisdom--like buddhism maybe--tend to sound like pessimism to modern ears)

It is lovely.

Beautiful.

tosh

albaniaaaaaa

albaniaaaaaaa

you border on

theeee

aaaaa

driiiii

atic

aaand your main export is _______

someone tweeted this one today, from the master:

"Our existence is happiest when we perceive it least; from this it follows that it would be better not to have it." -- Schopenhauer

I dunno if Russell Hoban counts as an anguished philosopher but it's his birthday, from Turtle Diary:

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: 'This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: 'This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C377vV6XAAAjb91.jpg

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter4.html

The road dividing the two, as far as our well-being and enjoyment of life are concerned, is downhill; the dreaminess of childhood, the joyousness of youth, the troubles of middle age, the infirmity and frequent misery of old age, the agonies of our last illness, and finally the struggle with death — do all these not make one feel that existence is nothing but a mistake, the consequences of which are becoming gradually more and more obvious?

Schopenhauer was a pretty intense guy

he's so right

I don't think existence is a mistake, because we don't really have much of a choice in it; even committing suicide has biological roadblocks to it. Enjoy the ride, then you die, because it's going to happen anyway. What else can ya really do.

bitch about it in beautiful prose.

just going by that quote, the answer clearly is to commit suicide before you hit middle age

I've seen people have ball into their 80s. If Schopenhauer took the stick out of his ass and partied a little, maybe he would've had a different view of things.

* a ball

idk if u read enough about gnarly living conditions anytime pre-second half of 20th century, life really become intolerably painful a few decades in, i could see rational suicide just in that 'fuck it' mode. but middle age is much less troubling and old age much less infirm and miserable now than it was in Schope's day, so imo we ought not complain

If there's one thing I know, it's life in excruciating pain. Not only that, but there's a good chance I'm going to die a horrible death in my 40s or 50s, which is coming soon. Schopenhauer has no idea what he's talking about as far as that goes; Nietzsche was a thousand times worse off than him and somehow found out how to have a better attitude.

you're a lot less funny than schopenhauer

I'm a lot less a lot of things than Schopenhauer. Big deal.

i wonder if schopenhauer would feel so down in the dumps if he ate more fibre or took up badminton

Who knows, maybe his philosophical viewpoint was caused by a bad diet. That's about how deep and meaningful things are in life, I've found.

lots of things with simple causes can still be articulated spectacularly & profoundly, and something having a straightforward cause doesn't necessarily make it any more straightforward to deal with

"You've got forever; and somehow you can't do much with it. You've got forever; and it's a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators."

Jim Thompson

oooh I like that

I was curious about the regard for Cioran in his homeland:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/45/36/9f/45369ffa1a48d1120144c62425fcb2ea.jpghttp://www.sculpture.ro/photos/1_1382548347.jpghttp://static4.evz.ro/image-gal-604/2014-11/bustul-lui-emil-cioran-in-rasinari.jpghttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ro/thumb/7/79/Emil_Cioran-bust.JPG/675px-Emil_Cioran-bust.JPG

Seriously doubt this would bring him any real pleasure, but perhaps a puckish chuckle.

Top right is brutal. It's like the Eiffel tower with his head stuck on top.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/scholarly-advice-for-dark-times

From a James Wood essay about Bohumil Hrabal:

Hrabal sometimes said that he rooted his comedy in one of his favourite findings, a dry-cleaner’s receipt, which read: ‘Some stains can be removed only by the destruction of the material itself.’

Ha

Been reading Thacker's "Infinite Resignation"--and while I wasn't very impressed at first it has grown on me. Hopelessly "academic" (as that needless academic qualifier in the title gives away, even fucking resignation has to be xtreme now!), since it's as much about reading the great pessimists and thinking about pessimism as a form of thinking as it is an instance of the thing itself. Sometimes quotes from Cioran or whoever come up and they are bracing in their directness, which Thacker by contrast often places at a kind of theoretical remove--as if he's asking what it means to see the world this way rather than directly feeling it, maybe he's only tempted. Not always, of course,...though T's pessimism is very different from his (our?) heroes because it's so damn secular and prosaic...no "tears of the saints" here...Raises the question if there could be a "Book of Disquiet" for the hyper-connected 21st century...I think the disgust is there but not often those quiet solitary lost hours which seem to be the necessary environment for, say, Cioran envying the freedom of the stillborn...

Nope, 37:40 evolved into Jackie Moore - This Time Baby (1979)

Wrong thread, sorry.

Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road. If you can’t replace the fear or the thrill of the chase why stir yourself to persue yet another empty kill? Why carry on with the charade?

Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all

Arthur Balfour