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Books and documents

Books, letters, historic documents, sayings. Known or relatively known people.

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In his “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” which was written in 1937, two years before his death, Freud expresses his deep frustration with the futility of the therapeutic attempts to cure self-destructive tendencies, “In no phase of one’s analytic work does one suffer more from the oppressive feeling that all one’s efforts have been in vain and from the suspicion that one is ‘talking to the winds’” (p. 404) The death drive reveals itself as incurable, it is a constitutive obstacle beyond which therapy is not capable of progressing. One can say that since the curse of the negative psychoanalytic insight, psychoanalysis has functioned as a breakdown of itself. It is a disappointment, a negation and rejection and a failure of itself. Psychoanalysis has thus become negative, an empty, meaningless husk—the living dead.

The negative insight undermines psychoanalysis from within. Like a black sun that shines with darkness instead of light and, with this, dismisses its essence. A practical therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis is its outer shell that remains from its original positive framework. As long as psychoanalysis maintains functioning in its therapeutic dimension, it betrays its negative insight and inner breakage, making the psychoanalyst a fraud. The psychoanalyst, in this case, is like a priest who lost his faith in God and fell into deep despair but still preaches, attending to the demand of the parish.

This internal breakdown can be considered a defeat of psychoanalysis, its failure, and its disability. From this, one might conclude that psychoanalysis should be relegated to the basement of history as a failed project, Freud should be declared a charlatan, and that various more empirically validated methods of comprehension and treatments that really help should now rightfully declare their victory over psychoanalysis, or that psychoanalysis has to be fixed, for example, by combining it with modern research. Such attempts have been made many times.

However, to me, this inner breakdown of psychoanalysis, its internal tragedy, which many adherents of psychoanalysis, including Freud himself, try to cover up, is the dearest in psychoanalysis. In this tragedy of the impossibility of psychoanalysis, in its curse, one can feel something painfully dear, absurd, and therefore sincerely human, and for the same reason, unbearable and repulsive. Perhaps in this personal tragedy of Freud and the tragedy of the breakdown of psychoanalysis, in their wretchedness, they coincide the most with the more profound deep pathetic and tragic truth about each of us. In this rupture with itself, psychoanalysis coincides with us, with our inner rupture, and with the inner rupture of the world.

Plunging into a black night of its soul, it meets the soul of each of us since the darkness of the soul is the only thing we genuinely hold in common. Our internal breakdown, brokenness, malfunction, tragedy, and absurdity encounter who we most genuinely are. This psychoanalysis coincides with life as such, as something doomed to failure and, in its essence, is nothing but a failure.

Julie Reshe, “Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead”

These are the kind of people who live on the edge of life, so to speak, who are thrown into uncharted waters by their melancholy, and somehow manage to find the surface right before they are lost to the high tides. Anyone who has gone through debilitating bouts of depression knows what the feeling is like: you stand at the cliff of a mountain and gaze right into the abyss, whose gravitas is irresistible. During those times, it really helps to have something; anything at all to grab onto – your job, your spouse, a family member, a promise made to someone, even a pet. As the years pass, however, you start to lose those things, everything feels old, repetitive, and it is not the case for melancholics to be friendly or even easy to be around to keep relationships. This results in the loss of personal meaning, and the fundamental truth of life hits the hardest when personal meaning is non-existent, for there is no cosmic one. The abyss pulls you in; you wade into the cold, uncharted waters, lost in its deep oblivion. This, to me, is suicide par excellence, and only a very contemplative few get to carry it out.

Selim Güre – The Occult of the Unborn

Things change faster and faster and we keep keeping up because we are afraid to die.

Vsauce in the video “Illusions of Time”, inspired by “Social acceleration” by Hartmut Rosa

The principle of sympathy for intense suffering (ed. that is, the alleviation of intense suffering has moral priority over everything else) defended here stems neither from depression nor resentment. Rather, as the name implies, it simply stems from a deep sympathy for intense suffering. It stems from a firm choice to side with the evaluations of those who are superlatively worst off. And while it is true that this principle has the implication that it would have been better if the world had never existed, I think the fault here is to be found in the world, not the principle.

Magnus Vinding – Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

Luciano had become so used to being alone and living cocooned in his hermitage that seeing a psychologist would have been unthinkable: you cannot conceive of solving a problem if the problem is all you have. It’s easier to lie down inside your own noise and sing something stupid over it when possible. And so, some days, for Luciano it could almost feel like happiness, even with a hint of pride, in the awareness that no one was trying to make him feel better except himself.

Le vite potenziali (“Potential Lives”) – Francesco Targhetta

The superego is a structure soluble in alcohol.

The first psychologists, in the 1960s, when they introduced psychology in Italy (as Galimberti recounts in an interview).

– Do you smoke a lot?

– As much as I can. As much as I can. I don’t even keep track. Whatever… I won’t die healthy, but it’s hard to die healthy. What really hurts is living, because by the sheer act of living, we die.

Vittorio Feltri in a home interview

Beyond the Sad Passions – Miguel Benasayag

Everything happens as if the permanence of his suffering were the undisputable proof of his identity in the sense of its singularity: “I suffer, therefore I am.” Read the full page

The Society of Deviants – Piero Cipriano

The schizoid is rigid in his decisions […] Read the full page

Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it.

Michel Houellebecq – Submission

I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.

Michel Houellebecq – Submission

Music is my friend. Understanding, empathic. Forgiving, comforter. A towel to dry tears of sadness. A source for tears of happiness. Liberation and flight. But also a painful thorn. In flesh and soul.

Arvo Pärt – Even if I lose everything (2015)

When I said to him: “Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?”

And he said, “Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn’t be satisfied.”

TED – Why does the universe exist? – Jim Holt

About the movie “Melancholia” – Florin Flueras

All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page

Zachary Wheeler – Treatment of schizoid personality: an analytic psychotherapy handbook

There is even a debate as to the legitimacy of schizoid personality as a diagnosis (Slavik, Sperry, & Carlson, 1992). Fairbairn was amongst the first to note that schizoid states are present to some degree in all people, and span a continuum from normal to severe and debilitating (Fairbairn, 1940). Recent authors assert the normalcy of temperamental introversion (Cain, 2012), the biases of object relations theory toward the primacy of relationship (Modell, 1993; Storr, 1988), the creative and regenerative functions of reclusive behaviors (Storr, 1988), and the gains and pleasures of seclusion (Rufus, 2003) as counterarguments to pathologizing schizoid-like behavior. Continue reading

Let’s Talk About Music – Stefano Bollani

Ever since I was a child, I struggled with the idea that at some point you had to choose a specific path, in music as in life. Read the full page

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

You can imagine, a seventeen-year-old, it’s the age when one fights furiously with their father, even now, and they fought furiously back then too (ed. in the Middle Ages), as in every era, at that age.

Alessandro Barbero, Festival della Mente 2011[🡕]

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

If you believe everything you read, you better not read.

A saying, generally mis‑labelled as a Japanese proverb.

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

It takes two to have a child, but you think alone.

Alessandro Bergonzoni

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti

The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

David Eagleman – “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives”

It’s really not that hard to understand people: you just have to not listen to them and “look” at their appearance.

Grotteschi e arabeschi (Grotesques and Arabesques) – Vitaliano Trevisan

You Can’t Go Back: The Story of Ernesto Lomasti – Luca Beltrame

A single mistake and… a mother’s tears, a father’s silent grief, and for everyone else life would go on just the same. Read the full page

Often, journalists or even in casual conversations, I have been asked the question: why do you write? Normally, I answer, and it is the truth, that there are two reasons of great importance. The first has to do with the need not to have a boss. The second, not to get up early. I think everyone would agree that these are not only important things but also, in general, difficult to achieve.

Javier Marías

If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.

Often attributed to Mark Twain, but origin unverified

The Instinct of the Wolf – The Law of Lone Wolf – Massimo Lugli

I grabbed a newspaper from a trash bin and read it from top to bottom to pass the time. Politics, sports, entertainment. I couldn’t understand why people cared so much about all that bullshit. Read the full page

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

There were only two or three of us in Rome who considered climbing not just a hobby, but a job: to set off, to become obsessed with a wall of rock, to feel, before every attempt, the Route looming above you in an oppressive way, to feel anxiety rising uncontrollably, to fall asleep with the Route in your head, to alternate periods of nervous insomnia with periods of morbid drowsiness, to wake up with the Route still in your head, to deprive yourself of something, and to suffer, even if that something, or that suffering, is not necessarily connected to performance. It’s just that it’s written in the laws of the universe that to obtain, you must suffer, even if suffering does not necessarily mean you will obtain anything. So, you seek suffering, because it pricks you, awakens you, activates you, and at times breaks that opaque glass that almost always stands between you and reality; it makes you feel, at least sometimes, that you’re alive, and sometimes feeling alive is more important than feeling good. Serenity can be sacrificed in honor of life itself, if only to avoid falling back into that horrible nirvanic anesthesia.

Alessandro “Jolly” Lamberti – Jollypower

The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery

Lastly, teenagers think they’re adults when in fact they’re imitating adults who never really made it into adulthood and who are running away from life. It’s pathetic. Read the full page

I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that that’s not the answer.

Jim Carrey, Ottawa Citizen, December 2005

✻

I’ve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame, so that they could see that it’s not where you’re going to find your sense of completion.

Jim Carrey, commencement address at Maharishi University of Management, May 24, 2014

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Kurt Vonnegut – A Man Without a Country

But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

David Foster Wallace, This Is Water (commencement address at Kenyon College

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear – Part 1. Baby It’s Cold Outside

People can’t seem to get it through their heads that there is never any healing or closure. Ever. There is only a short pause before the next “horrifying” event. People forget there is such a thing as memory, and that when a wound “heals” it leaves a permanent scar that never goes away, but merely fades a little. What really ought to be said after one of these so-called tragedies is, “Let the scarring begin.”

George Carlin – When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

Old people, they look back at the good old days, and it was good because they were young. But they act like it was “the day”. No, it was ’cause youth is good: that’s gone, you’re fucked; it’s not the day. And then they reject anything that’s new, it’s like we do with fucking hip-hop, if you’re in your 30s: «Oh, fuck that, that ain’t music, we had music back when 38 Special was around…» What? No. Let’s all fucking kill ourselves for the hypocrisy, right?

Doug Stanhope – Deadbeat Hero

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

Pirandello proposed, among the alternative solutions to the problems of existence, murder, suicide, or madness; nowadays, in an age of frantic synergies, we must combine the different possibilities, so we must become completely mad, kill the highest possible number of individuals, and then finally commit suicide.

Carl William Brown (Bruno Mensi)

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

Madness is simply pain.

Vittorino Andreoli

Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills the self and the other. Despair is a form of madness possible for man, for all men; it is, in fact, a human perspective, tied to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment.

Vittorino Andreoli, Il lato oscuro (“The Dark Side”) (2002)

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – John Gray

r/Pessimism, u/historyismyteacher Continue reading

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

Michel Houellebecq – Platform

“What surprises you most about mankind?”

God answered:

“That they get bored of being children, are in a rush to grow up, and then long to be children again. That they lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, they forget the present, such that they live neither for the present nor the future. That they live as if they will never die, and they die as if they had never lived.”

Often misattributed to the Dalai Lama; from “An Interview with God” by James J. Lachard (pen name of James J. Brown), early 2000s – wording may not match the original exactly.

God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment – Scott Adams

The subconscious is an odds-calculating machine. Read the full page

Some people are alive simply because it’s against the law to kill them.

Variations:

Many people are alive only because it’s illegal to shoot them.

The law against murder is the number one thing preventing murder. Louis C.K.

Dear life, when I said “can my day get any worse,” it was a rhetorical question, not a challenge.

Unkown source

The so-called ’psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ’hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling “Don’t!” and “Hang on!”, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

David Foster Wallace, The Depressed Person

Reviews of “The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace

Wonderfully modeled on the depressing spiral of searching within oneself to find an answer to a problem that IS oneself. Read the full page

The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age – Alain Ehrenberg

More than a source of mental pain, today depression is a way of life. Read the full page

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

The sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era, the broken dream of the belle époque. As with the fall of the Babylonian empire, the sinking of the Titanic represented the symbol of the crumbling of proud empires, with a similar mix of rich, bourgeois and poor all destined together for the abyss. It was the end of a legend that married technology to wealth, materialism to romance, illusion to fantasy.

Massimo Polidoro, The Curse of Titanic

Lying On the Couch – Irvin D. Yalom

But Marshal had not been swayed by these new developments. At sixty-three, he had been a psychiatrist long enough to have lived through several such positivistic swings. Read the full page

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

The Liars’ Club – Mary Karr

If we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him.

John C. Holt – How Children Learn

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, by Richard Dawkins

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.

As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.

Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.

The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.

Carmelo Bene, Autografia di un ritratto (“Autograph of a Portrait”)

Disorders of the Self – New Therapeutic Horizons: the Masterson Approach – James F. Masterson and Ralph Klein

It is very common for schizoid individuals to present for treatment in their 30s and 40s, at a time when the possibility of a relationship is growing more tenuous and that of companionship seems to be getting more and more distant. Read the full page

As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna

“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page

Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as he law of the market’. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. On the economic plane Raphael Tisserand belongs in the victors’ camp; on the sexual plane in that of the vanquished. Certain people win on both levels; others lose on both. Businesses fight over certain young professionals; women fight over certain young men; men fight over certain young women; the trouble and strife are considerable.

Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte), Michel Houellebecq

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.

Michel Houellebecq – Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte)

Whatever – Michel Houellebecq

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself. Read the full page

As the taxi took me through the city to the station, I felt as though I’d been dropped onto another planet, a cruel and hostile place. Inclined by character to silence and reflection, I’d always been repulsed by noise and uproar, by any manifestation of the excessive merriment that so often borders on violence. I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it.

The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig

The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig

I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it. Read the full page

Angels of the Universe – Einar Már Guðmundsson

No, this grave is not deep enough to accomodate the feelings of us all. Read the full page

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Cormac McCarthy, The New York Times Magazine, interview

The Policy of the Superego: Foundations of Structural and Dialectical Psychopathology – Luigi Anepeta

In the context of obsessive experiences, depression intervenes […] driven by a push for change that leads the subject to feel the need to address their unfulfilled needs. However, these needs have taken on an anarchic and transgressive drive and are intensely guilt-ridden. Continue reading

Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.

Karl Kraus

Hope is the last thing to die… but it’s always the first to fuck you over.

Italian saying

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

George Carlin – Doin’ It Again

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

For me, the fuller the [theatre] halls are, the emptier they are.

Carmelo Bene, on various occasions

I’m not interested in solving the ills of society. I don’t want to save the world. I don’t even want to save me… I think most talk is so boring; I mean: save this, do that, do this… I think we’re all so boring saying everything we don’t even wanna save ourselves, we’re so boring talking about it. There’s nothing left to save, we’re so fucking boring. Let it die, I say. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.

Charles Bukowski – Let There Be A New Beginning

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found. «This is it… this is where I belong…»

The Conscience of a Hacker – The Mentor

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.

David T. Wolf, as quoted by Robert Byrne, in The Third – And Possibly the Best – 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said

From the sketch to the work one travels on one’s knees.

Vladimir Holan; quoted by Kundera in “The art of the novel”

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

Ernest Hemingway – The Garden of Eden

Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.

Emil Cioran – Anathemas and Admirations

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

The “ninety-ninety rule” in software engineering.

After you finish the first 90% of a project, you have to finish the other 90%.

Shorter and more general variant.

[…] for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called “schools,” […]

“The Abolition of Work”, Bob Black

Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.

Bill Hicks

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. Read the full page

It’s no longer a question of staying healthy. It’s a question of finding a sickness you like.

Jackie Mason

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves.

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.
Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person – of any person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.

The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever – attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

Everything wearies me, including what doesn’t weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.

[…]

There are times when dreaming eludes even me, an obsessive dreamer, and then I see things in vivid detail. The mist in which I take refuge dissipates. And every visible edge cuts the skin of my soul. Every harsh thing I see wounds the part of me that recognizes its harshness. Every object’s visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul.

It’s as if my life amounted to being thrashed by it.

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa

There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.

This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.

But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.

Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

There’s no bad like a good man gone bad.

Charlie (Bud Spencer) in “Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure”

The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams – The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler

Wild Justice – Wilbur Smith

Parker had trained himself to be totally celibate, channelling all his sexual energies into pursuits of the mind […] Read the full page

If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. Read the full page

I took my bottle and went to my bedroom. I undressed down to my shorts and went to bed. Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.

I took my choice. I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something.

Charles Bukowski – Women

Becoming aware of the oblivion of Being means witnessing the collapse of all that has been built upon its forgetting: God and world.

Umberto Galimberti – Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dell’Occidente (“Heidegger, Jaspers and the Decline of the West”)

How in the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

Charles Bukowski – Factotum

The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.

Bruce Lee – Tao of Jeet Kune Do (posthumous)

The unforgettable days in a man’s life number only five or six. The rest just fill up space.

Ennio Flaiano, Autobiografia del Blu di Prussia (“Autobiography of Prussian Blue”)

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

Because nothing challenges power as much as Resignation, which is, in fact, the rejection of power in any form (that is, it reveals power for what it really is: an illusion).

P.P. Pasolini, in “Tempo Illustrato”

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

Robert A. Heinlein – Time Enough for Love

When I torment myself a little too much for not working, I tell myself that I might just as well be dead and that then I would be working still less…

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

A thought which is not secretly stamped by fatality is interchangeable, worthless, is merely thought…

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

Satiety—I have just now uttered this word, and already I no longer know apropos of what, so readily does it apply to everything I feel and think, to everything I love and loathe, to satiety itself.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

In paradise, objects and beings, assaulted by light from all sides, cast no shadow. Which is to say that they lack reality, like anything that is unbroached by darkness and deserted by death.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

An obsession with the precarious accompanies me in every circumstance: mailing a letter this morning, I told myself it was addressed to a mortal.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

“For [Elohim] doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened…”
No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much…

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

In five hundred thousand years, it appears that England will be entirely submerged. If I were an Englishman I should lay down my arms at once.

Each of us has his unit of time. For one it is the day, the week, the month, or the year; for another, it is a decade, or a century… These units, still on the human scale, are compatible with any plan, any task.

There are some, however, who take time itself for their unit, and sometimes raise themselves above it: for them, what task, what plan deserves to be taken seriously? A man who sees too far, who is contemporary with the whole future, can no longer act or even move…

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present. By freeing himself from succession, he has devoured the possible and rendered the future superfluous. “I cannot meet you in your future,” he says to the others. “We do not have a single moment in common.” Because for him the whole of the future is already here.
When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs—between a false promise and the end of all promises.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born

Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I’ve got several degrees. Call me Mr.

Charles Bukowski – South of No North

It seemed a man only had two choices – get in on the hustle or be a bum.

Charles Bukowski – South of No North

…to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran

No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page

Death belongs to the realm of faith – you’re right to believe you will die, mind you… It sustains you. If you didn’t believe it, could you bear the life you have? If we couldn’t totally rely on the certainty that it will end, how could you bear all this?

Jacques Lacan, conference at the Université Catholique de Louvain

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.

Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

we’ve all heard the old women who say, “oh, I think it’s just AWFUL what these young people do to themselves, all that dope and stuff! I think it’s terrible!” and then you look at the old gal: no eyes, no teeth, no brain, no soul, no ass, no mouth, no color, no flux, no humor, nothing, just a stick, and you wonder what her tea and cookies and church and home on the corner have done for HER. and the old men sometimes get quite violent about what some of the young are doing – “hell, I worked HARD all my life!” (they think this is a virtue, but it only proves a man is a damn fool.)

Charles Bukowski – Tales of Ordinary Madness

[…] human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.

Tom Robbins – Another Roadside Attraction

Man was invented by water to carry itself uphill.

Simplified version circulated across the Internet

It’s not important “how true” this is or isn’t: it should be taken as a thought that attempts to summarize a wide range of theories, from the black smokers as the origin of life, to possible connections between quantum mechanics and consciousness.

Words ruin one’s thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, one’s memory manages to lose hold of even this ruined and ridiculous something. Paper can turn an enormity into a triviality, an absurdity. If you look at it this way, then whatever appears in the world, by way of the spiritual world so to speak, is always a ruined thing, a ridiculous thing, which means that everything in this world is ridiculous and ruined. Words were made to demean thought, I would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. In any case, words were bringing everything down, Konrad said. Depression derives from words, nothing else.

Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works

That Day on the Moon – Oriana Fallaci

[”…] And on their return, rest assured, they won’t be writing poetry. If they were capable of it, after all, they wouldn’t be going to the Moon. And, most importantly, they wouldn’t be coming back.” Continue reading

Aldrin: Beautiful view.

Armstrong: Isn’t that something? Magnificent sight out here.

Aldrin: Magnificent desolation.

Also see William Shatner’s trip to space.

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

Emil Cioran – The New Gods (“Le Mauvais démiurge”, literally “The Evil Demiurge”)

Writing becomes not easier, but more difficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Samuel Beckett, 1969 Vogue interview

What you are basically […] is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

Alan Wilson Watts, Out of Your Mind: The Nature of Consciousness (posthumous, 1998)

Let’s suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream; and you would – naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams – you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure, you see, and after several nights you would say, well that was pretty great!

But now, let’s have a surprise: let’s have a dream which isn’t under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that i don’t know what it’s gonna be. Then, you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream… where you are now.

Alan Wilson Watts, Out of Your Mind: The Nature of Consciousness (posthumous, 1998)

New age bullshit of course, but great emotional effect, especially in the following music piece:

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

My independence, which is my strength, entails solitude, which is my weakness.

P.P. Pasolini – Il Caos (“Chaos”), in “Tempo Illustrato”

Were (say) Frankl to attempt to cure (say) Zapffe from his “existential frustration,” “ontological despair” or “metaphysic-melancholic clairvoyance,” the chances are that Zapffe (rather than “cured”) would be baffled by Frankl’s sophomoric philosophizing. “You may be psychologically healthier than I,” Zapffe would gladly admit, “but I must insist that I am a better philosopher. A lifelong search for a meaning of life in general, and of my life in particular, has led me – reluctantly, but with cataclysmic consistency and sleepwalker’s certainty – to realize that it’s all fantasy and delusions, divinely subsidized to put us at peace with our ’situation.’ You are certainly right that psycho-pathological explanations of my biosophical pessimism would be totally irrelevant; but I also fail to see what you can possibly accomplish with your naïve, maladroit metaphysics, behind which – if you will permit me to speak your language for once – I see but the profoundest, most fundamental trauma, and that great universal repression which prevents all fatal insight into man and his ’cosmic conditions,’ the mysterious, grotesquely absurd origin and genesis of body and mind, their inalienable interests, and their final and complete obliteration, the return of the synthesis to the absolute zero.” The biosophist is fully aware of the many marvellous metaphysics offering “peace in heart,” “reconciliation with the world” and “atonement with the almighty,” or the like, to anyone who is willing to join this or that suificating sect, and replace intellectually honest experience with fictitious world views. The spiritual vacuum is often so painful that if the fiction is sufficiently permanent, it does not seem to matter if it should turn out not to be so terribly pleasant.

Happiness Is for the Pigs: Philosophy versus Psychotherapy – Herman Tønnessen

Happiness is for the pigs.

Title of the book by Herman Tønnessen

Flowers for Algernon (novel) – Daniel Keyes

Why am I always looking at life through a window? Read the full page

The schizoid individual (and this applies still more to the schizophrenic) does not bask in the warmth of a loving self-regard. Self-scrutiny is quite improperly regarded as a form of narcissism. Neither the schizoid nor the schizophrenic is narcissistic in this sense. As a schizophrenic put it, she was scorched under the glare of a black sun. The schizoid individual exists under the black sun, the evil eye, of his own scrutiny. The glare of his awareness kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it. And yet he remains, although profoundly not narcissistic, compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and/or bodily processes. In Federn’s language, cathects his ego-as-object with mortido (ed. the death drive).

A very similar point was made in different terms when it was said earlier that the schizoid individual depersonalizes his relationship with himself. That is to say, he turns the living spontaneity of his being into something dead and lifeless by inspecting it.

R. D. Laing – The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

What we are unable to change, we must at least describe.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

Unknown source, generally misattributed to Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

Béla Bartók, posthumously reported by The New York Times

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.

Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.

Allen Saunders, Reader’s Digest magazine

When the problem of happiness supplants that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its proper domain to engage in a suspect activity: it concerns itself with man… Questions it would once have scorned asking now attract its attention, and it attempts to answer them in all seriousness. “How is suffering to be avoided?” is the first to entice it. In a phase of lassitude, increasingly alien to impersonal concerns, to the thirst for knowledge, it abandons speculation and to the truths that disturb prefers those that console.

Emil Cioran – The Temptation to Exist

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

”… Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in staying here.”
“There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita. Read the full page

The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Various attributions

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

[…] only in madness
can one be clear.

“Picasso” – P.P. Pasolini

Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. Read the full page

Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman

I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable. Continue reading

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre

For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.

Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

Ronald Laing

Life is a sexually transmitted disease that slowly leads to death.

A different version, from the Internet

In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.

1984 – George Orwell

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

1984 – George Orwell

Do normies suffer?

In other words, you might say that I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick. My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I. I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.

I simply don’t understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighbor’s woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eat—these may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I don’t understand: if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine? Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves? If that is the case, their sufferings should be easy to bear: they are the common lot of human beings and perhaps the best one can hope for. I don’t know… If you’ve slept soundly at night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose. What kind of dreams do they have? What do they think about when they walk along the street? Money? Hardly—it couldn’t only be that. I seem to have heard the theory advanced that human beings live in order to eat, but I’ve never heard anyone say that they lived in order to make money. No. And yet, in some instances… No, I don’t even know that… The more I think of it, the less I understand. All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?—I don’t know.

No Longer Human / A Shameful Life – Osamu Dazai

Animal Farm – George Orwell

[…] After the horses came Muriel, the white goat, and Benjamin, the donkey. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark—for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at. Continue reading

All human activities are equivalent and all are on the principle doomed to failure. […] Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.

Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre

(In the dedication to Leone Werth)

All grown-ups were once children (but only few of them remember it).

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

All grown-ups were once children—although few of them remember it. Read the full page

Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

Winston Churchill, probably about Stanley Baldwin; Reader’s Digest magazine

You really have to see men from above. I put out the light and went to the window: they never suspected for a moment you could watch them from up there. They’re careful of their fronts, sometimes their backs, but their whole effect is calculated for spectators about five feet eight. Who ever thought about the shape of a derby hat seen from the seventh floor? They neglect protecting their heads and shoulders with bright colors and garish clothes, they don’t know how to fight this great enemy of Humanity, the downward perspective.

Erostratus – Jean-Paul Sartre

It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Wind, Sand and Stars

Nausea – Jean-Paul Sartre

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. Read the full page

The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.

Sigmund Freud, letter to Marie Bonaparte

You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

Olin Miller

The rushing river they call violent But the riverbed pressing it in Nobody calls violent.

Bertolt Brecht – On Violence (poem, excerpt)

The great problem is how to live without being conscious of the fact that we have got to live; how to divert ourselves without thinking of why we should seek diversion; not only to escape the spectre of Ennui, but how to act as though we did not know of its existence. We are all playing near a great fearful Presence, and our object should be to rivet our gaze so completely on our work and busy ourselves so closely with our toys that we shall not have time to look up and see the Thing. The Thing—stark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thing—is always right there over our shoulder. The most active beings are those who are trying, unconsciously, the hardest to dodge Its gaze. Man has no mission in life except to escape the “Black Man who will come and get you,” as we tell the children.

Benjamin De Casseres – Saint Tantalus, chapter “Disenchantment: Behind the arras”

Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.

Nikola Tesla, interviewed by Orrin E. Dunlap Jr.

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

Emil Cioran – On the Heights of Despair

The Last Messiah – Peter Wessel Zapffe

«Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.» Read the full page

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

[…] that mutilation in which life loses something it never had—the future—certainly simplifies our lives, but also renders them so senseless that I might be tempted to use the brief present to tear out the few hairs remaining on this crooked head.

Italo Svevo – A Very Old Man

As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.

Heidegger – Being and Time

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

James Branch Cabell – The Silver Stallion

Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.

Antonin Artaud, General Security: The Liquidation of Opium / La Révolution Surréaliste

I remembered then that once in England a sentence to forced labor was administered by suspending the condemned convict over a wheel turned by water, thus forcing the victim to move his legs at a certain rhythm to avoid their being crushed. When you are working, you always have the sensation of a similar constriction.

Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno

I’m through with psychoanalysis. After having practiced it faithfully for six whole months, I’m worse off than before. […]

I had put myself in the doctor’s hands with such trust that when he told me I was cured, I believed him completely and, on the contrary, I didn’t believe in my pains, which still afflicted me. I said to them: “You’re not real, after all!” But now there can be no doubt! It’s them, all right! […]

[…] But now that I know everything, namely that it was nothing but a foolish illusion, a trick designed to affect some hysterical old woman, how could I bear the company of that ridiculous man, with that eye of his, meant to be penetrating, and that presumption that allows him to collect all the phenomena of this world within his great new theory?

Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno

Natural law does not entitle us to happiness, but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow. When something edible is left exposed, from all directions parasites come running, and if there are no parasites, they are quickly generated. Soon the prey is barely sufficient, and immediately afterwards it no longer suffices at all, for nature doesn’t do sums, she experiments. When food no longer suffices, then consumers must diminish through death preceded by pain; thus equilibrium, for a moment, is reestablished.

Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno

Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn’t tolerate therapies.

Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno

Health doesn’t analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.

Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno

And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.

Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

Albert Schweitzer (unconfirmed)

Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Sigmund Freud

Such memory-traces, then, have nothing to do with the fact of becoming conscious; indeed they are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness. Read the full page

Short Stories for a Year – The Wheelbarrow – Luigi Pirandello

When there’s someone around, I never look at her, but I feel that she’s looking at me, she’s looking at me without taking her eyes off me for a moment. I’d like to make her understand in private that it’s nothing, that she should relax, that I couldn’t allow myself to perform this brief act in front of others, that for her it’s of no importance, but for me it’s everything. I perform it every day at the right moment in utmost secrecy and with frightful joy because, trembling, I experience the delight of a divine, conscious madness that for an instant frees me and allows me to get even with everything. Read the full page

In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) – Marcel Proust

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Read the full page

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

Only in the Italian translation by Guido Almansi:

idleness (n.)
Intervals of lucidity in the chaos of life.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Theory of Harmony – Arnold Schoenberg

Life and death are both equally present in the embryo. What lies between is time. Nothing intrinsic, that is; merely a dimension, which is, however, necessarily consummated. Let the pupil learn by this example to recognize what is eternal: change, and what is temporal: being (das Bestehen). Read the full page

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

The old norms having collapsed, and the new ones not yet arisen or firmly established, it is natural that the concept of the relativity of everything has expanded in us to such a degree as to almost entirely make us lose our sense of evaluation. No one is any longer able to fix for themselves a firm and unshakable point of view.

Luigi Pirandello – Arte e scienza (“Art and Science”)

Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer – Studies on Hysteria

[…] that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it; […]

George Bernard Shaw

Anyone who isn’t born with the necessary wings will never grow them afterwards. Anyone who can’t drop instinctively and at the right second like lead on prey will never learn, and there’ll be no point in his watching others who can, as he’ll never be able to imitate them. One dies in the precise state in which one is born, our hands mere organs made for catching instinctively or letting what one has fall through one’s fingers.

Italo Svevo – A Life

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

Jerome K. Jerome – Three Men in a Boat

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

Mark Twain

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy—ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!

Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.[🡕]

Friedrich Nietzsche – The Joyous Science

Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps? – To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is “in a hurry.” Philology is, namely, that venerable art that requires of its admirers one thing above all else: to go aside, to take time, to become still, become slow – as a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word, which has nothing but fine, cautious work to take care of and which achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for exactly this reason, philology is today more necessary than ever, by exactly this means, philology attracts and enchants us most powerfully in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, […]

Nietzsche – Dawn – Preface – 5

For this reason I enter into solitude – so as not to drink out of everyone’s cisterns. Amid the many I live like the many and don’t think as I; after some time I always feel then as if they wanted to ban me from myself and rob my soul – and I turn angry toward everyone and fear everyone. Then I need the desert to turn good again.

Friedrich Nietzsche – Dawn – 491

Women can form friendships with men very well; but to keep them, a little physical antipathy is very helpful.

Nietzsche – Human, All Too Human

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
(The Anna Karenina principle)

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, ’til at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: “Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is – to die soon.”

Friedrich Nietzsche – The Birth of Tragedy

Inwardly he congratulated himself on having left behind him the irksome, irritating demands and menaces of mundane existence—on having placed a great distance between himself and the horizon where there may be seen flashing the lightning-bolts of keen pleasure, and whence come the thunder-peals of sudden affliction, and where flicker the false hopes and the splendid visions of average happiness, and where independence of thought gradually engulfs and devours a man, and where passion slays him outright, and where the intellect fails or triumphs, and where humanity engages in constant warfare, and leaves the field of battle in a state of exhaustion and of ever-unsatisfied, ever-insatiable desire.

Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov

Men laugh at eccentrics like that, but women recognize them immediately. Pure, chaste women love them, out of sympathy; corrupt women seek out their friendship in order to purge themselves of spoilage.

Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov

Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.

Henry Thomas Buckle

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Hector Berlioz

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things…

Henry David Thoreau – Walden

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth – look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

Søren Kierkegaard, journals

One only hears what one understands.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Mountains are silent masters and make silent students.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Actually, when the student happens to attain a mind so ready and vigorous, he might go astray way wilder and perilouslier than his master.

Filosofia di Giacomo Leopardi (“The Philosophy of Giacomo Leopardi”), Domenico Solimani

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.

Arthur Schopenhauer – Parerga and Paralipomena

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence is in itself valueless, for boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.

Arthur Schopenhauer – Parerga and Paralipomena; also in “Essays and Aphorisms”

A man is wise only on condition of living in a world full of fools.

Arthur Schopenhauer – The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims

To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair.

Søren Kierkegaard – The Sickness Unto Death

[…] deep, deep, and forever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial

Hvad er ungdom?
En drøm.
Hvad er kærlighed?
Drømmens indhold.

What is youth?
A dream.
What is love?
The content of the dream.

Søren Kierkegaard – “Either/Or: A Fragment of Life”. Quoted in the movie “Another Round” (2020)

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

We cannot give ourselves courage.

Don Abbondio in “The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

Two truths that men will generally never believe: one, that they know nothing; the other, that they are nothing. Add a third, which is closely related to the second: that they have nothing to hope for after death.

Leopardi, Zibaldone, 4525-4526

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

Eleandro. Therefore those are greatly mistaken who say and proclaim that the perfection of man consists in the knowledge of truth, and that all his ills arise from false opinions and from ignorance, and that mankind will at last be happy when each man, or most men, shall know the truth, and according to that alone compose and govern their lives. And this is said by nearly all the philosophers, ancient and modern. Now according to your judgment, those truths which are the substance of all philosophy ought to be concealed from the majority of men; and I believe you would readily agree that they ought to be ignored or forgotten by everyone: for, once known and kept in the mind, they can do nothing but harm. Which is the same as saying that philosophy must be extirpated from the world. I am not unaware that the final conclusion to be drawn from true and perfect philosophy is that one must not philosophize. From this it follows, first, that philosophy is useless, because to this end of not philosophizing, it is not necessary to be a philosopher; secondly, it is most harmful, since that final conclusion cannot be learned except at one’s own cost, and once it is learned, it cannot be put into practice; it being not in man’s power to forget the truths once known, and it being easier to lay aside any other habit than that of philosophizing. In short, philosophy, hoping and promising at the outset to cure our ills, ends by vainly wishing to remedy itself.

Giacomo Leopardi – Small Moral Works – Dialogue between Timandro and Eleandro

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

It is no longer possible to deceive ourselves or dissemble the truth. Philosophy has made us understand so much that the forgetfulness of our own selves, that once came so easy, is now impossible.

Giacomo Leopardi – Small Moral Works, Fragment on Suicide

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

I will answer you in good conscience and I will swear to you, that since I set foot in this city, not a single drop of pleasure has fallen upon my soul; except in those moments when I have read your letters, which I tell you without any exaggeration have been the most beautiful moments of my stay in Rome: and those very few lines that you placed beneath my Mother’s letter, were for me like a flash of light breaking through the dense, mute, and desolate darkness that surrounded me. You will say that I do not know how to live; that for you, and for others like you, the fate would not be the same. But listen to my reasoning and to the facts. Man absolutely cannot live in a large sphere, because his strength or capacity for relations is limited. In a small town we may grow weary, but in the end man’s relations to man and to things do exist, because the sphere of those relations is narrow and proportioned to human nature. In a large city, man lives without any relation whatsoever to what surrounds him, because the sphere is so vast that the individual cannot fill it, cannot sense it around himself, and thus there is no point of contact between it and him. From this you may infer how much greater and more terrible is the boredom one feels in a large city than that which one feels in small towns: since indifference – that horrible passion, or rather non-passion, of man – truly and necessarily has its main seat in large cities, that is, in very extensive societies. Man’s sensitive faculty, in these places, is reduced to sight alone. This is the sole sensation of individuals, which in no way reflects inwardly. The only way to be able to live in a large city, and the one which all, sooner or later, are obliged to adopt, is to form for oneself a small sphere of relations, remaining in complete indifference toward all the rest of society. That is to say, to build around oneself a kind of small town within the large one; the rest of the big city remaining useless and indifferent to the individual. […]

Giacomo Leopardi to Carlo Leopardi – Rome, December 6, 1822

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

To desire life in any case, and in the full extent of that desire, is in short nothing other than to desire unhappiness; to desire to live is tantamount to desiring to be unhappy. (March 20, 1821).

Leopardi, Zibaldone, 829-830

Joy’s recollection is no longer joy,
while sorrow’s memory is a sorrow still.

Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) – Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (act II, scene I)

The World as Will and Representation

[…]But, besides all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I;—to him who uses it. During life the will of man is without freedom: his action takes place with necessity upon the basis of his unalterable character in the chain of motives (ed. cause-effect chain). But every one remembers much that he has done, and on account of which he is by no means satisfied with himself. If now he were to go on living, he would go on acting in the same way, on account of the unalterable nature of his character. Accordingly he must cease to be what he is in order to be able to arise out of the germ of his nature as a new and different being. Therefore death looses these bonds; the will again becomes free; for freedom lies in the Esse, not in the Operari[…]

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, as found in “generic_gnostic_01_shard” in the video game “Cyberpunk 2077” (2020)

[The human life] swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

Full excerpt:

We have already seen in nature-without-knowledge her inner being as a constant striving without aim and without rest, and this stands out much more distinctly when we consider the animal or man. Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst. The basis of all willing, how­ever, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents. This has been expressed very quaintly by saying that, after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom.

There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy… So long as we persist in this inborn error, and indeed even become confirmed in it through optimistic dogmas, the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence… hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.

Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation

If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred.

Mary Shelley – Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

In these last days I’ve been much better (in a way however, that anyone who’s fine, falling into this “better”, would assume to be dead) […]

Giacomo Leopardi to Pietro Giordani, Recanati, August 8th 1817

https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1603551[🡕]

Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).

Imagination, as I have said, is the primary source of human happiness. The more it reigns in a person, the happier that person will be. We see this in children. But it cannot reign without ignorance, at least a certain ignorance, like that of the ancients. The knowledge of truth, that is, of the limits and definitions of things, constrains imagination.

Giacomo Leopardi – Zibaldone

A leopard can’t change its spots.

A saying

Genius is nothing more than an extraordinary capacity for patience.

Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.

Genius is eternal patience.

A saying

Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, “Am I happy?” and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, “No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.”

Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first… Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there.

In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte – Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (“Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgment on the French Revolution”)

[…] and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv’d and practis’d on.

Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Benjamin Vaughan

O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.

Julie or the New Heloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Life as a repetition of the same dull, insipid routine of insignificant actions of buttoning and unbuttoning, of sleeping and waking, of eating, and hunger returning, and these ditto, ditto repeated…

“On Life” by G. S. – “The Public Advertiser” of London

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

René Descartes – Principles of Philosophy

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely Players;

William Shakespeare – As You Like It

Out of the mouths of babes and drunkards comes the truth.

English saying

If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola – Oratio de hominis dignitate (“Oration on the Dignity of Man”)

The Imitation of Christ – Thomas à Kempis

Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. Read the full page

There is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in wretchedness; […]

Dante Alighieri – Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto V

Life is, in man, the use of reason.

Dante Alighieri, Convivio (“The Banquet”), Book IV, Chapter VII; expanding from Aristotle’s “De Anima” (Book II)

But beware of the dire consequences…

Unfortunately, I shall have to say, my mother, why did you conceive me, son of bitterness and sorrow? Why did I not die in the womb? Having come forth from the womb, why did I not perish immediately? Why was I taken up on the knees? Why was I nursed at the breasts? Born to be burnt and to be fuel for the fire? Would that I had been slain in the womb so that my mother might have been my grave and her womb an everlasting conception. For I should have been as if I had not been, brought from the womb to the tomb.

Lotario dei conti di Segni (before becoming Pope Innocent III) – On the Misery of the Human Condition

It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.

St. Syncletica

See the gulf of time behind and another infinite time ahead. What difference is there in this respect between an infant who lives three days and someone who lives three times as long as Nestor?

Marcus Aurelius – Meditations, 4.50

Out of the womb, into the tomb.

(and variants)

Also see the crazy Xbox ad.

CHORUS
(Str.)
Who craves excess of days,
Scorning the common span
Of life, I judge that man
A giddy wight who walks in folly’s ways.
For the long years heap up a grievous load,
Scant pleasures, heavier pains,
Till not one joy remains
For him who lingers on life’s weary road
And come it slow or fast,
One doom of fate
Doth all await,
For dance and marriage bell,
The dirge and funeral knell.
Death the deliverer freeth all at last.
(Ant.)
Not to be born at all
Is best, far best that can befall,
Next best, when born, with least delay
To trace the backward way.
For when youth passes with its giddy train,
Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils,
Pain, pain for ever pain;
And none escapes life’s coils.
Envy, sedition, strife,
Carnage and war, make up the tale of life.
Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage
Of unregarded age,
Joyless, companionless and slow,
Of woes the crowning woe.

Sophocles – Oedipus at Colonus (transl. by F. Storr)

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly, and of their own accord, preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward.

Socrates in “Phaedo” by “Plato”

Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. (Every thing is ephemeral, everything is transient.)

Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes

I said to myself concerning the sons of men, “God has surely tested them in order for them to see that they are but beasts.

Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.

Both go to the same place—they came from dust and they return to dust.

For who can prove that the human spirit goes up and the spirit of animals goes down into the earth?”

Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes, 3:18 – 21

Omnia fui, nihil expedit.

Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus

I’ve been all things, but all was worthless.

Nihil sub sole novum.

Qohelet, 1,9-10

Nothing new under the sun. (Everything has already been said or done before.)

He whom the gods love dies young.

Menander, 4th-3rd century BCE

Memento mori.

(Remember that you have to die.)

A well-known expression dating back to the times of ancient Rome.

Life is suffering.

The First Noble Truth in Buddhism – though the concept also appears in much older texts from other cultures.

I know that people’s lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps.

Bible – Jeremiah 10:23

In medio stat virtus.

Virtue lies in the middle.

The truth lies somewhere in between.

Moderation is key.

Balance is the key to everything.

The concept of limit, of the right measure, in Plato.

Wikipedia:
The expression goes back to the medieval scholastic philosophers, although already Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (”Μέσον τε καὶ ἄριστον” – The mean is the best thing), Horace in the Satires (“Est modus in rebus” – There is a measure in things), and Ovid in the Metamorphoses (“Medio tutissimus ibis – by following the middle way, you will walk most safely) had expressed a similar concept.
A comparable idea is also found in Buddhism: The path that leads to the cessation of suffering is called the Middle Way, because it avoids the two extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, excessive behaviors that do not lead to mental peace. This path, developed in the Noble Eightfold Path, consists in cultivating virtue, meditative serenity, and wisdom.

Ignorance is bliss.

Eram quod es, eris quod sum.

I too was what you are (alive), you will be what I am (dead).

(Often found on gravestones.)

Làthe biòsas.

Epicurus

Stay aloof / live secluded.