"We laugh, but inept is our laughter;
We should weep and weep sore,
Who are shattered like glass, and thereafter
Remolded no more.”
—Al-Ma’arri
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The following website is a good introduction to philosophical pessimism (Not my website.):
https://blackastheace.medium.com/life-is-not-great-1e803641f470
“We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life... the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.”
~ Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born
#philosophy #philosophicalPessimism #quotesToLiveBy #quotes #EMCioran #AntiNatalism
“In a culture that prizes the can-do, self-starter attitude, to be a pessimist is simply to be a complainer – if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. To live in such a culture is to constantly live in the shadow of an obligatory optimism, a novel type of coercion that is pathologized early on in child education in the assessment: ‘Does not like to play with others.’”
~ Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than the Night
“Because of consciousness, parent of all horrors, we became susceptible to thoughts that were startling and dreadful to us, thoughts that have never been equitably balanced by those that are collected and reassuring. Our minds now began dredging up horrors, flagrantly joyless possibilities, enough of them to make us drop to the ground in paroxysms of self-soiling consternation should they go untrammeled.”
~Thomas Ligotti
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#consciousness #philosophy #pessimism #ThomasLigotti #antinatalism
“From an evolutionary viewpoint, in Zapffe’s observation, consciousness was a blunder that required corrections for its effects. It was an adventitious outgrowth that made us into a race of contradictory beings—uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation.”
~Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (TCATHR)
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#consciousness #philosophicalPessimism #pessimism #ThomasLigotti #antinatalism
“Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?”
—Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
#pessimism #philosophicalPessimism #quotesToLiveBy #quotesDaily #philosophy #quotes
“The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep).”
“Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”
~Eugene Thacker, Cosmic Pessimism
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth."
~Ecclesiastes 7:3 - 7:4, The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New Revised Standard Version)
"Life’s tragic character gradually disappears as you go down the scale toward the inanimate realm… When you come to a point where you want to live like a plant, fully unconscious, then you have come to the despair of humanity."
~ Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
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#pessimism #nihilism #philosophy #quotes #quotesToLiveBy #philosophicalPessimism
“A crying baby is the purest expression of the inanity of being human.”
~ Eugene Thacker
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#pessimism #philsophy #antinatalism #philosophicalPessimism #quotesToLiveBy
"Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious."
~E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist