Quotes
Quotes, aphorisms, extracts, adages, sayings, maxims, proverbsâŚ
https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizoid/comments/1n739i1/comment/nc4w1c2/[đĄ]
r/Schizoid, u/White_Wolf_11
To subject someone to a romantic relationship with me would be immoral.
Takes on the SzPD + AvPD diagnosis
https://www.reddit.com/r/Schizoid/comments/1mquasr/comorbid_avpd/[đĄ]
r/Schizoid, u/UtahJohnnyMontana
My completely amateur take is that schizoid is avoidance squared. It is avoidance of avoidance. It is uncomfortable feeling all those things that cause avoidance. Why avoid the things that cause uncomfortable feelings when you can avoid feeling anything at all? And then the veil comes down and you are schizoid. It seems like this happens early for some, late for others, and sometimes not at all, but if you look back far enough, there was usually a time when a schizoid was a pretty sensitive and avoidant looking person.
u/PjeseQ
Didnât pursue official diagnosis, but itâs quite probable that I used to be avoidant in my teens vs schizoid now. As far as I can remember, avoidant traits were much worse to deal with. Itâs much easier to be just indifferent towards interpersonal contact rather than anxious about it.
There is also this conspiracy theory circling around that a burned out AvPD turns into SPD eventually. I think it might be true to some extent.
u/defectivedisabled, r/Pessimism
Suffering when seen as a metaphysical force is just like a perpetual machine. It runs on the fuel that is suffering and generates suffering as the byproduct, which it then uses to fuel itself further and continue the cycle. There maybe some peak and trough in the amount of suffering but suffering can never be fully eradicated. Suffering is self sustaining and is basically like a pantheist âGodâ. We are all part of it and it and it only exists through our suffering. Suffering is the essence of life, it is the reason for everything we do what we do. Suffering makes us perform actions to relief itself but would then create new forms of suffering as a result. A lion kills and eat a zebra so it may stay alive and procreate to further perpetuate this cycle in an ever increasing scale until the zebra population collapses and the lion population collapses as well. This cycle would then start afresh, it is an endless cycle with no end in sight.
We are all parts that made up of this âGodâ and it is our suffering that gives âlifeâ to it. What this means for we is that we are created to suffer and perpetuate suffering. All for the manifestation of this âGodâ into the world. You can only do what is allowed within the limits of being a cog in this ungodly machine and any attempts to fight against the will of this âGodâ is futile. An end to this metaphysical force is nothing to grieve for indeed.
Why do we want to create an ASI
Perhaps, at least in part, the quest to create an artificial consciousness is part of a longing that comes from the human unconscious. We long for entering into communion with other minds different from our own. We do not want to suffer alone in a high degree of knowledge and for this we are willing to create an artificial consciousness. The same impulse may serve as the basis for those who seek to find other intelligent consciousnesses in the stars, through the discovery of intelligent alien life.
Fernando Olszewski, https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/01/the-mistake-of-rokos-basilisk.html[đĄ]
r/Schizoid, u/Alarmed_Painting_240
need to wipe, destroy, and start over.
That sort of opposition to being or becoming anything, especially in a social or self-image way, seems to me almost the essential schizoid trait. Sometimes it starts early, sometimes it develops slowly over time. Online or real life contacts, they might end up with similar fates. The moment we decide that itâs not who we are. But itâs not like we know what else weâd be. Not that, I suppose. Or strong associations with negative stuff occurs, like a bad smell.
It can be kind of interesting to see this opposition in so many ways looking back. Not always in obvious ways. Itâs not like schizoids only find themselves to be empty or (desiring) nothing, it can be just as well the active undoing of whatever is forming. To start existing even in the most superfluous ways, becomes terrible, boring or just too fake.
SzPD â Playing life in hard mode
Reply to âWhy is being schizoid bad?â:
r/Schizoid, u/melonpathy
I think being schizoid is like playing life in hard mode. You donât belong but you have to play along. Itâs tiresome to have to just observe human life, not being able to really participate, itâs like being forced to watch someone eat a delicious looking cake and not getting to taste it, ever. And despite not maybe always feeling like it, schizoids are human too. Humans are hard-wired to be social animals, it is in our genetics. Whether you enjoy socializing or not, it is good for your cognitive and even physical health.
And emotions are what motivates all action, whether you realize it or not. Thatâs the very purpose why we evolved to have emotions, to motivate us so we would survive. Avolition and anhedonia are destructive, they are a disturbance in the human drive to do things that are important, basically they hinder your ability to lead a good life. You also need motivation to do stuff like graduate and hold a job, which are needed for getting money, without which you cannot get insurances or anything else. Schizoids have the lowest life success rate of all personality disorders.
But of course some are more high functioning than others, basically some people here have the disorder and some have the personality type, I think. You have a personality disorder only when it causes suffering for you. If someone doesnât mind their schizoid traits and they are able to function fairly well then itâs not a personality disorder but a personality style, and Iâm speaking of the former here.
r/Schizoid, u/Concrete_Grapes
Schizoids are somewhat in a unique place as far as personality disorders go. We are inward facing, self-validating, self-reliant (on thinking through things, not always financially or housing), etc.
So, we frame the world, usually, as if everyone else is or should be this as well. To us, this is âthe normââand we literally cannot gain something good, or new, from interactions. We donât need to interact with someone to validate an experience, or âmove onâ from some emotional attachment or slight.
However, normal people do not exist like this at all. Ever. Not even a little. Not for even a handful of minutes a year.
They are always outward facing in searching for validation. They feel they have no value, unless itâs measured by, or against someone else. Their emotions literally exist only as a function of social validation, or as an attachment to others. If they are mad, they are mad at someone. If theyâre sad, they need to process it with others, and reference stability and coping mechanism off the âotherâ⌠they cannot do this on their own.
Thatâs why virtually everyone that goes to therapy, goes to deal with their emotions, and the severe control emotions have over their actions.
Thatâs why a schizoid often gets nothing from most therapists, itâs not emotions for us, weâre stuck internally, conscious, and intellectualizing emotions away if they do happen, or forcing them to appear when we lack them. Hyper-aware of this, usually.
Other. People. Never. Do.
So theyâre reaching out to process and connectâtheyâre unfulfilled, or some door isnât closed, and they feel an internal emotional sense that they âmustââsome how, reference off you to complete the task.
To you, thatâs nonsense.
I mean, Iâm saying it in an extreme way, and one can argue itâs not always like thisâand itâs not.
But go read what âmindfulnessâ isâthe thing where people struggle to do it even a few minutes a day, after months of trying, on purpose, and tell meâif, to you, that sounds like horse shit, because itâs describing a state youâre in 99 percent of the time as default.
Thatâs what I mean.
God handed me the fruits of his creation, then took my taste.
Reddit, u/Illustrious-Back-944 talking about anhedonia
Can a pessimist have hope?
r/Pessimism, u/ajaxinsanity
Hope is expectation coupled with fear that something will not work out. As such it is almost the opposite of pessimism. Pessimism is about abandoning hope and expecting the worst, which is often closer to the truth.
Hopium is very bad for you in general because itâs unstable, depends on imagination and ambition, therefore making you anxious. Be realistic and apply reason, not hope.
r/Pessimism, u/SIGPrime
The risks we take during life to ultimately not suffer are due to the original imposition done upon us in birth. Whoever you want to blame, be it your parents, ancestors, or god, someone created you into a life where you must impose to limit suffering.
I suppose one could argue that being a parent could also be necessary to achieve happiness in many cases, but this is a Ponzi scheme sort of arrangement.
I think I have postpartum depression. It started right after I was born.
From the internet.
Treading water
u/Critical-Sense-1539, r/Pessimism
I get a similar sentiment whenever I come across popular âself-improvementâ content. Iâve never bought any promises that I could ever better my life or progress in any real sense, for no matter what I achieve, I will always be striving. I donât get inspired whenever I see someone struggle really hard for wealth, influence, a big muscly body, a romantic relationship, or some other insipid marker of success.
I see a futility in these attmepts to attain âfulfilmentâ or the âgood lifeâ, a bit like the futility of treading water. You swing your arms and kick your legs to stay afloat, just so youâre able to breathe for a moment longer. However, no matter how hard you try, youâre not going to get out of the water. Youâre always sinking so to stay above water, you have to expend effort over and over and over again until youâve got none left to expend.
I see all pursuits for fulfilment in this sort of image; we are always lacking something. Living to try and satisfy all your desires is a game that you can only ever lose because for every desire that one satisfies, another shall show up in its place. Now, realizing this probably wonât fix the pain associated with not achieving your desires but it might help alleviate feelings of self-hatred or guilt for having a âbad lifeâ. After all, thereâs no need to feel bad about yourself for losing a game that was impossible to win all along.
On defeatism
r/Pessimism, u/defectivedisabled
Defeatism is just a term society use to gaslight people into conforming with social expectations. You could very well be considered a defeatist in a capitalist society by embracing minimalism. There is no such thing as a defeatist in absolute terms. This term solely exist to shame and guilt trap people to fall in line with what is expected of them. It is also a relativistic term that requires a specific setting for the term to have a meaning. You might be considered a defeatist in capitalistic society by giving up on the rat race and becoming a minimalist. But on the other hand, you are an âoptimistâ within the minimalist community.
There is no such thing as âgive upâ. Even embracing nothingness requires effort. Activities that induces a sense of liberation such as meditation actually requires putting effort to work. Therefore, it is nothing but gaslighting to say one is a defeatist when one decide to go on a path of liberation rather than participate in the rat race. The word defeatism is designed to keep people trapped in a cycle of endless suffering. It is done by holding onto the idea that there is some kind of reward waiting for them at the end when they eventually âwinâ at whatever they are doing.
r/Pessimism, u/Robotoro23
This is how people today justify suffering of people when industrial revolution began, âit was worth it because we now have a fridge, medicine and technology.
This is how now people are justifying suffering of people today, âitâs worth it because we will reduce even more suffering with additional technology
The problem with that line of thought is that it presupposes an end to our misery, that technology will bring salvation and create Utopia.
What those same people donât get is that suffering is fundamentally ontological to humans and everything around us.
Hypothetically even if we managed to cure every disease, every mental health âproblemâ, everything being automated, upload our consciousness to machines etcâŚ
After all of that, the questions people very like to ignore is this: what after that?
A sterilized society devoid of pain will only bring boredom and boredom eventually turns into suffering and we are back to square one: how to reach salvation of existence?
r/Pessimism, u/Robotoro23
People ultimately read books, play video games, watch fiction etc⌠Because they suffer. They engross themselves as a fictional spectator to forget about their personal life predicament thus unawarely denying Will to Life and affirming non existence periodically to lessen their suffering.
r/Pessimism, u/HumanAfterAll777
I think striving for happiness is like chasing the dragon
[âŚ] When I was truly happy was when I was a child. When I was ignorant of the world and what horrors it contained. Something you can never go back to. [âŚ]
r/Pessimism, u/GloomInstance
Thereâs a moment when the intelligent empath, perhaps born with a melancholic bent, realises they are stuck in a kind of mortal reality show of endless suffering.
They look out at the sunset over a peaceful lake, only to see a pelican swoop down and grab up a fish, swallowing the fish whole as it visibly flaps around, trying to resist its awful fate.
Then the thinking empath reflects on how cruel and unfair the natural state of things is, and that they themselves are stuck inside the cruelty fishbowl and will most likely suffer their own grizzly decline.
I remember as a child of eight or nine years old, sitting in the bathtub weeping at how much suffering the world contains, and how little protection against it we have. It must have been when my first grasp on death and the nature of things occurred.
r/Pessimism, u/scorqio
One must know that things also become dull. Stale.
What i think will make me happy today, may not have that same impact next week.
Be critical of those who paint vice in nostalgic light, or youâll normalize confinement, and call it home.
r/SuicideWatch, u/braujo
[âŚ] The reason youâre unhappy isnât a lack of working on yourself, thatâs something people tell you on Reddit to feel better about themselves. Plenty of fat ass motherfuckers are out there living their best lives, there are monsters that get married and built a beautiful family, ugly guys that get laid every dayâŚ
Working on yourself is great if thatâs what you want, but do not fool yourself. The reason our lives suck isnât superficial, self-help bs. Itâs something deeply wrong in our brains.
*Watching a scenery IRL*
Pia: Itâs like something from a painting.
Davis: Thatâs because people paint landscapes.
Black Mirror S06E02 âLoch Henryâ
In his âAnalysis Terminable and Interminable,â 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, âIn no phase of oneâs analytic work does one suffer more from the oppressive feeling that all oneâs efforts have been in vain and from the suspicion that one is âtalking to the windsââ (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 huskâthe 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, âNegative Psychoanalysis for the Living Deadâ
u/WanderingUrist
Iâm unclear as to why self-worth is necessary or meaningful. If you need to engage in self-delusion to delude yourself into believing in another delusion, you are probably better off with just dropping all of it.
Some of that discouragement for me (ed. in advocating) comes from seeing this world lacking in a plethora of metacognitive skills. Even the institutions themselves that discuss mental health â papers, researchers, those that present themselves as being scientifically minded, unbiased, and focus entirely on a description of the nature of certain things regarding mental health and neurodivergency â are constantly lacking so much metacognition that the very papers, the very pieces of research I read make that very apparent. And the people doing such work in the therapeutic world and otherwise donât have any idea itâs happening. They donât even know. So much so that Iâve seen forms of therapy that are attempting to instill metacognition in many of those that suffer with psychosis and many of those that are considered schizo-spectrum⌠When metacognition is the reason those people are sometimes crippled, mentally crippled by the world that they inhabit. But still, they try to produce more of it, only in a direction that would make them more functional, more available, more compliant to a society that they already oftentimes perceive as being run by mad men, and supported by cowardice, fear, death, fear of worthlessness, fear of invalidation. And in name of those things, the banality of evil grows and grows and grows.
Schizoid Angst â Schizoid Ramble: Emptiness and Advocacy
r/Pessimism, u/CardinallyConsidered
Too much ignorance, and we have absolutely no respect for the potential for suffering that exists here. We are far more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot (so to speak), cause others as well as ourselves more pain than we ever thought possible, only to eventually decay and die.
Too little ignorance, and you become completely frozen by fear. You fully recognize the fragility of your body, the consciousness resting in it, and the fragility of all individual life forms.
[âŚ]
A certain level of solipsism is required for a decent quality of life. A certain level of ignorance and delusion are required for a decent quality of life.
[âŚ]
The sweet-spot of delusion. Thatâs where itâs at.
[âŚ]
Meditation has helped me in very gradually lifting the veil of safety/security. And then psychedelics rip the veil off of your face all at once and itâs just WAY too much. We are biologically programmed to be reproducing machines, and there are many mechanisms in place that keep us from completely losing our very complex human minds.
(Speaking about abortion and guns)
Welcome to right wing America, where if you want to end a young life, you have to shoot them.
Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)[đĄ]
As if through the mist Fading slow From this moment From this life
Of no fulfillment Of no discovery
Only the passing Only the flowâŚ
Leaving from all That once had a meaning
To reach deep For the inner desolation
To awaken the emptiness That was always there Here, in the stillness A yearning For an ending
Shape of Despair â The Inner Desolation
Chained To this feeling Into something There are no words for
Stranded in thoughts
Shape of Despair â Solitary Downfall
We contain the ending
Shape of Despair â Return to the Void
Long after It was too late To find back All meaningful The glow long gone The spark faded
And though I saw The others Advance and vanish Into the distanceâŚ
I chose to stay behind To wander astray To remain unfound To merge with these dark thoughts As I saw and felt this existence As mere reflection In slow time
Shape of Despair â Reflection in Slow Time
The effect of feelings All lost their strength All lost their meaning
Sinking horizons Drowning the view
Shape of Despair â Forfeit
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 â 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 GĂźre â The Occult of the Unborn
For people with social anxiety disorder, everyday social interactions cause irrational anxiety, fear, self-consciousness, and embarrassment.
From Wikipedia.
The irony. Thinking is bad. Having a consciousness is bad. You have to be dumb and live the illusion.
r/Pessimism, u/Madular
Also a lot of people will tell you to just fake it/force it and it will became real, which is bs. The only real thing that can help is to find what you are good at, and what you enjoy and follow that path.
But finding what you are good/enjoy is another challenge in of itself.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
What really busts my balls is the cheerfulness of morning radio shows.
Natalino Balasso, YouTube, @Telebalasso, clippino di ottobre[đĄ]
Things change faster and faster and we keep keeping up because we are afraid to die.
Vsauce in the video âIllusions of Timeâ, inspired by âSocial accelerationâ by Hartmut Rosa
[young people] went out there to stop discrimination â not all discrimination, just some of it⌠Which is a weird form of discrimination, butâŚ
Louis C.K. â âSorryâ special
And all the parties they fade And yes, my looks, theyâll go away Iâll just be left here in America But she never had a home for me
London Grammar â America
Itâs like when you have a toothache and you curse yourself for all the times you felt fine and didnât fully appreciate how great it was not to have a toothache, and you promise yourself that if thereâs ever another day in your life when you donât have a toothache, youâll spend at least half of every day you have left reflecting on how great it is not to have a toothache, and you certainly wonât complain about stupid things anymore, like, I donât know, noisy neighbors or not being able to find a parking space â my God, how wonderful it is to not find a parking space without a toothache!
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog âIn coma è meglioâ (âBeing in a Coma is Betterâ) â Il famoso asteroide (âThe Famous Asteroidâ)
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 â Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications
There is no magical third act
I just⌠I just cannot believe this is it. This is life. There is no magical third act where I am the star in some fantasy adventure. I wonât suddenly gain superpowers and fight cartoonish villains. This is it. This is all it will ever be. The rest of my life, quiet and drab. Our one shot at consciousness is spent on something so unimaginably boring. My curse of sentience is spent wageslaving, consuming media, messing around with hobbies that will never fill the void, shitting, cleaning. Thatâs all it will ever be. Sad and pathetic.
Popular chansâ meme/copypasta
They make it sound as if women give you who knows what⌠Itâs something that lasts five minutes. Among other things: the pleasure does not last long, the effort is big, and the position is ridiculous.
Vittorio Feltri, on multiple occasions, on TV and on radio
But what happens if your parents grew up in a home where there was a lot of rage, your parents are terrified of rage, so they give you the message that good little girls donât get angry. The message that you get is that angry little girls donât get loved. So, to maintain your relationship with your parents, then you â not consciously, but automatically â your brain will repress anger in order to maintain the relationship with parents who canât handle your anger. Because maintaining that relationship is the only way to ensure your survival. Itâs been shown in studies after studies that repression of anger also represses the immune system, so you get e.g. colitis.
Because the two systems are part of the same supersystem, and because healty anger and the immune system have the same function, which is to protect you. So suppressing your self-protection in one way is suppressing it in another way as well, and that same system will then turn against you, and now you get an autoimmune disease.
The emotional repression disorganizes the immune system.
Gabor MatĂŠ â The Roots of Healing â âSounds Trueâ (Tami Simon), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P38fhtdWFhY[đĄ]
Rocco Siffredi and Candy Red chatting in âRoccoâs Intimate Casting 21â
â Youâre a nymphomaniac. [âŚ] When I was young, I was like you. [âŚ] Iâd just think about sex, all the time.
â Yes? And you fucked all the girls?
â I tried.
â But?
â I didnât fuck all of them because itâs difficult for a man. But for the woman itâs more easy (sic): you can fuck everyone. Right?
â Yes.â, and she laughs.
Once again, the children of the core think to change the inevitable. They do not see the truth, the futility of their actions. We bring purity to chaos, serenity to bedlam. All will be consumed. This is necessary and good. The children do not understand. The children believe their lives worth living.
The children are wrong. The worlds and the core of the worlds live in pain, agony, discord. We bring peace. Equality. Silence.
All are one within our embrace. The children resist what cannot be resisted. They fight a battle that cannot be won. Their actions are ultimately irrelevant. No matter how many times they rise, they will be destroyed. Their time is over. We will consume all.
The âRootâ, via âDreamerâ / âNightmareâ, in âRemnant: From the Ashesâ
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Luigi Anepeta, psychoanalyst, at LIDI (Italian League for the Protection of Introvertsâ Rights)âs official forum
https://lidi.forumfree.it/?t=51672617&st=30#entry625292054[đĄ]
The percentage of introverts varies depending on the statistics: in the absence of a clear definition of what it means to be introverted, estimates range from 5% to 25% â the latter figure being supported by American researchers. The 5-7% estimate proposed in my book âTimido, docile, ardenteâŚâ wasnât based on formal studies, but rather on my own observations in elementary schools, where the introverted child â easily recognizable at a glance â tends to be, on average, 1 in every 15 to 20 students. Today, I would be inclined to widen that range to 5-10%.
That introversion has a genetic basis â whose positive or negative developments depend on environmental influences â seems to me beyond doubt, given not only the behavioral traits observable early on, but especially the inner experiences (empathy, sense of justice, aesthetic sensitivity, etc.): these â both the traits and the experiences â are consequences of neoteny, which is, in absolute terms, the most defining feature of introversion.
Genetics is an extremely complex science and susceptible to ideological âaberrationsâ. With regard to introversion, what seems certain is that there is no single introversion gene, but rather a constellation of genes â dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands â present in the parental genetic makeup and âextractedâ as a result of their combination. In parents, these genes may be evident as personality traits or masked by the dominance of extroverted genes. Once extracted and variously combined, they give rise to the introverted mode of being.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Artists are expensive because they do drugs and have to deal with costly divorces.
Natalino Balasso, YouTube, Redbox, episode 1
Anonymous 04/23/18 (Mon) 13:55:38 No.174245, obscure imageboard
[âŚ]
>>174236
Secrets are all too easy to deal with. Skeletons in the closet are easy to hide. Itâs when your entire being itself is a secret, thatâs when interacting with people becomes complex and difficult, painful even.
Iâve noticed that so much of genuine social interaction rests on sharing experiences. Technical discussion is a kin to small talk and fails to bridge a gap between people and form a connection. Itâs about seeing a reflection of yourself in your environment, seeing that a shared reality exists between you and another being, thatâs what truly quenches loneliness.
The usual normalfag advice of âjust be yourselfâ seems so appropriate now.
Itâs possibly all theyâve ever known.
Anonymous 02/09/18 (Fri) 20:03:16 No.3716, obscure imageboard
[âŚ]
But try to look at it with full honesty, without bias: the closer you look at yourself and the actual course of your life, the more you realize the objective fact: you were the Rain Man retard. And all your imaginary lives are delusional fantasies.
â [âŚ] Iâd say youâre confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives: we drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job⌠or the happy marriage. But these arenât decisions, theyâre⌠theyâre impulses. In fact, youâre probably better equipped to explain this than I am.
â What does that mean?
â Youâre a biologist. Isnât self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?
Annihilation (2018)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
whatever question youâre asking yourself, the answer is that youâre not in control, so ride the wave but be ready to swim
Natalino Balasso, YouTube, @Telebalasso, 2018 New Yearâs Speech[đĄ], in the end credits
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. Itâs 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 (âPotential Livesâ) â Francesco Targhetta
I believe that we do not die because we fall ill, but we fall ill because we must die.
Umberto Galimberti, in various lectures
Depression is like reverse cancer: thereâs so little you want to do, but you have so much time left.
From the internet
â Whatâs so bad about being a pig?
â Itâs undignified.
â Undignified?
â Walking about with your nose the same height as your asshole.
â Snout.
â Whatâs that?
â Pigs have snouts, not noses. So it would be your snout the same height as your asshole.
â Nose, snout⌠Youâre still trotting about gazing up everybody elseâs assholes all day long. What kind of society is that?
â An equal one?
Black Mirror S04E05 âMetalheadâ
Itâs like with human life: if youâre lucky enough to reach old age, the phases of your life will be: birth, childhood, puberty, masturbation, masturbation with a partner, pathetic attempts at masturbation, and death.
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog âIn coma è meglioâ (âBeing in a Coma is Betterâ) â Come nasce una teoria del complotto (âHow a Conspiracy Theory is Bornâ)
[âŚ] men are stones; they do not change.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
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).
The first meeting with Alcoholics Anonymous unsettles you not because they are alcoholics, but because they are anonymous.
Massimiliano Parente, ilgiornale.it[đĄ]
â What I mean is that some people are born to suffer, and if theyâre made to suffer, it doesnât matter because itâs what they were born for.
â Thatâs horrible.
â The world is horrible; the human being is horrible; but we canât run away from it, because we are the horror. You have to accept it.
Skins (Pieles) â Eduardo Casanova
We both know that you wanna love her Skies are open crying, please donât believe her âCause sheâll tell you lies and then say it doesnât matter And youâre pleased to see her calling them non-believers
[âŚ]
Do you realize again, you chased an idea, healed an earth behind some broken creature?
London Grammar â Non Believer
Life is unpredictable and control is just an illusion.
Hannah, 13 Reasons Why
Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.
Umberto Galimberti at a conference
â Do you smoke a lot?
â As much as I can. As much as I can. I donât even keep track. Whatever⌠I wonât die healthy, but itâs hard to die healthy. What really hurts is living, because by the sheer act of living, we die.
Vittorio Feltri in a home interview
Anonymous 02/29/16 (Mon) 08:44:00 No.5738, hikkichan.com (dead)
[âŚ]Maybe life is better enjoyed when we forget we even have one? [âŚ]
Every singer, poet, or writer has ninety-nine âloveâ at their disposal, after which they die.
Astutillo Smeriglia in his blog âIn coma è meglioâ (âBeing in a Coma is Betterâ) â Proposte per un mondo migliore (âProposals for a Better Worldâ)
â No one really likes what they do.
â Then why do we do it?
â Because weâre driven. Maybe a bit insecure. We get into things when weâre young and because we think they mean something.
â And then we find out that they donât.
â Oh, Susan, enjoy the absurdity of our world (ed. contemporary art business). Itâs a lot less painful. And believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world.
âNocturnal Animalsâ, the gay husband
There is no freedom/choice/option of an instant/painless/effortless/guaranteed/permanent way out of life (and existence), therefore, life (and existence) is prison/torture/slavery/rape, and therefore, life (and existence) is survival of the stupidest.
Ever Deeper Honesty â Anonymous, https://www.everdeeperhonesty.com/[đĄ]
Also see:
- /thoughts/this-life-is-a-prison.html
- /images/smbc-this-life-is-a-prison.html
- My music track âThis life is a prisonâ[đĄ]
Picky eaters, they grow up to be depressives and sexual anorexics, you know.
Pazuzu in The Exorcist (TV series), episode 4 season 1
â Thereâs a common, sentimental notion that angels are all around us, solving little domestic problems. But in the Bible, when humans encounter an angel, they fall to their knees in fear. These are beings of tremendous power. Think of the first renegade angels, in league with Lucifer. They were strong enough to challenge God. And surely, GodâŚ
[âŚ]
God actually created these rogue angels, knowing that they would defy Him, because what was the end result of this defiance?
The police superintendent: â Lucifer came to Earth in the guise of a serpent.
â Very goodâŚ
[âŚ]
And what did we gain from that famous snake? Knowledge, free will, the ability to think for ourselves, which led to everything you see now in this room: civilization, art, culture, music⌠life. In some strange way, these rogue angels were the architects of all that we hold dear.
Dr. John Rexroth in The Exorcist (TV series), episode 6 season 1
The true, only problem, is not having the aptitude for suicide.
Someone on the internet, around 2016
Anonymous 06/09/15 (Tue) 22:18:58 No.2771, hikkichan.com (dead)
Another aspect of escapism is that it is an addiction.
Like junkies, we need ever higher doses and at one point there simply isnât enough left, so we end up looking at the same shit over and over again desperately trying to remember how it was like when we first saw it, but by then it no longer satisfies.
[âŚ]
Boredom is the real problem of men; humans can bear next to anything when they are distracted, and most of our activities are steered towards that goal.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
What does it mean â and I close with this somewhat pedagogical note â what does it mean to âanticipate deathâ? That is, to be persuaded that one must die; what is the advantage of the tragic dimension?, which consists in the fact that you have to die and there is nothing waiting for you in the afterlife? The advantage is that you work a relativization of the problems of the now. You donât rush like a desperate man, you donât argue like a madman. You donât kill yourself for the worries of the world, because you are mortal; you are mortal, and when you have to retire you donât despair, you donât die two years after: because death is still there waiting for you, itâs not as if life ends: youâre the one who made it coincide with your work life and outside that you no longer know who you are. Because by now our identities are assigned by our social roles, right? We know who we are only because others recognize us in a role, outside that we no longer know who we are; and indeed all actors and actresses lead tragic lives, why is that? Because they didnât anticipated death, because they didnât assumed it as a condition⌠like a thickness of the soul, here â letâs use this word even if it refers to an entity that does not exist, the soul indeed.
But letâs keep this anticipation in mind, because by relativizing things we stop those typical dramas of those who believe in the immortality of the soul and therefore believe that this life has its own importance, their Ego becomes hegemonic and what depends on the Ego decides life and death; a love ends, and women are killed because itâs all over: no, no, no, stop. If you internalize death in advance then you relativize all things, and all things donât have that thickness of despair anymore (despair, not tragedy). But who are these desperate people? Those who had hope. Because those who never had hope, never despair.
Umberto Galimberti at Paisiello Theater in Ruffano (Lecce)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
I donât want to tell you clichĂŠs like âbe yourselfâ, because itâs clear that if youâre an idiot, being yourself wonât help you.
Natalino Balasso, YouTube, 2015 New Yearâs Eve Speech[đĄ]
Approaching form Approaching a deeper meaning
My fragments lay scattered Buried deep Never awaken
Still dreaming of life
Shape Of Despair â The Distant Dream of Life
It would have been so different Without this burden This sense of nothingness The lifelong defeat That took us here To a distance unreachable To a grey indifference Into these vast Monotony fields
Shape of Despair â Monotony Fields
Let them grow their beards and talk careers
Molly Nilsson â Mountain Time
Windows 95, youâre long gone but Iâm still alive [âŚ] Windows 95, is only a metaphor for what I feel inside And although Iâm older now Thereâs still an emptiness Thatâs never letting go somehow [âŚ] Have you ever walked into what seemed To be somebody elseâs dream? And though the time wonât let you pass It keeps you looking through the glass
Molly Nilsson â 1995
Living with a woman is like sharing a bed with the CIA: nothing is secret.
Love
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 thatâs all there is to it.
Michel Houellebecq â 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 â every researcher, every writer, every spy.
Michel Houellebecq â 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 â Even if I lose everything (2015)
When I said to him: âProfessor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?â
And he said, âOh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldnât be satisfied.â
TED â Why does the universe exist? â Jim Holt
Love doesnât exist: itâs just the forceful echo of moral rules pressing on peopleâs cravings; the easiest remedy for the fear of being unable to stand alone.
Fabi Silvestri Gazzè â Lâamore non esiste (âLove Doesnât Existâ)
Itâs not that old people are wise: they just have a very low dose of sexuality and aggressiveness â thatâs it. And at this level they are also calm, unless they have a bad temper.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
â I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that itâs obviously my programming. And I lack the constitution for suicide.
Rust in âTrue Detectiveâ
â So, tell me. Why do you want to kill yourself so badly? Mummy and daddy, they didnât love you enough?
â No, it had nothing to do with anything like that.
â It has everything to do with âanything like thatâ.
The Suicide Theory
Fritz Maisenbacher on YouTube commenting Feinbergâs transcription of Bachâs âOrgan Triosonata in C major BWV 529, mvt. II. Largoâ played by Feinberg himself.
For me, the greatest Bach player of all time. He works only on the total sadness of Bach. Bringing in full light the absolute despair of Bach. And with such elegance! Strange and mourning voices in the darkness. Inviting you to their dark evening.
âť
No âthumb downâ and so goes further this holy way to express Bach, and further the ultimate singing of Feinberg, oh the nightly climax between 2:24 and 2:44⌠this is beyond my own possible emotional capacity⌠and the last lights at about 5:33⌠ade⌠ade⌠and the last chord at 6:36, not to be commentedâŚ
âť
Last week, I was in the hospital for another surgery.
Upon me, before and after the operation, I saw faces. I heard voices. Looking at me, talking to me.
And this evening, listening to this music, I understand all of it.
Ill or not, young or old, all these persons, kind nurses, charming anesthetist, competent doctors, royal surgeon, all of them, all of them, with no exception, faced also their terrible destiny, on the Titanic of earthly life⌠Their eyes are full of love and anguish, in a pathetic mix between life and death.
I came home now, bleeding and suffering, in the tiny hope of a good convalescence, and I listen to Feinbergâs Bach.
He is not an Angel, but he speaks for all of us.
In his hands, our destinies. Pain and sorrow, love, kisses, incandescent lips of desire, and always these dark evenings, and sudden lights, all together.
A complete life.
Bach knew it, Feinberg knows it, all these faces, these smiles, these eyes full of sadness and hope, all of us⌠all of usâŚ
After all, society was not prepared to accept people like us who had different life needs, who wanted to be in company but wanted to be alone, who wanted money but didnât want it, who were a total contradiction, of life, of their id.
The Crazy Woman Next Door â Conversation with Alda Merini
â No, I donât believe that bad people exist; I believe that various forms of desperation exist. Some of these forms are so intense that the person who is suffering from them becomes the perpetrator of their own crimes, but not the mastermind. They find themselves committing a crime with astonishment.
Silvano Agosti â Ricky Farina (@rickyfarina) â âDialogo con Silvanoâ (âConversation with Silvanoâ), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anXfrcF-zE4[đĄ]
Money doesnât buy you happiness, it just buys you a lot of therapy to talk about why youâre not happy.
Castro in Grand Theft Auto V
What we should do is take all the mentally defective people in this country and give them government jobs, and just sit back and watch things improve.
George Carlin quoting a joke by his brother Patrick â âUnmaskedâ interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-clvDxl8qI[đĄ]
To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: âPussy.â Whereas I answered âThe smell of old peopleâs houses.â The question was âWhat do you really like the most in life?â I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.
The Great Beauty
This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Itâs all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world. Blah, blah, blah, blah⌠Beyond there is what lies beyond. I donât deal with what lies beyond. Therefore, let this novel begin. After all, itâs just a trick. Yes, itâs just a trick.
Jep, âThe Great Beautyâ, ending
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
And if you donât win [at the slot machines], try asking yourself a question: if you were lucky, do you really think youâd be working in a call center?
Natalino Balasso, âBalasso testimonial videopokerâ[đĄ]
But youâd only take a life That was already over to save another
Electric Youth â The Best Thing
All right, look, man, Iâm cashing in. Iâm done. Iâm 40 shit years old, I got nothing, I got nobody. And I donât want anything, I donât want anybody; and thatâs the worst part: when the want goes. Thatâs⌠thatâs bad. I mean, like, suffering is one thing, or ânot havingâ is one thing⌠But when you just donât care anymore?
You know, Iâve gone soft in the last three pussies Iâve been in. You get to a point where you go âMaybe itâs time to just put a period at the end of my⌠whatever this was.â
Louie, S02E09 â Eddie (Doug Stanhope)
Grey visions of today Every sight I see the same I can not break free I think Iâm gone As though I never wake Always drawn into descent And my hope decays Just out of reach
Cursed through life and condemned to misery To be left with nothing
Woods of Desolation â SomehowâŚ
There are many ways of dying; the worst of them is to continue living.
This must be the place
Love is two weeks of happiness, two months of arguing and two years of recovering.
Q / Desire / Q: Amours, dĂŠsirs et complicationsâŚ
â No, no, youâll have a thousand nights like this one. You wonât remember this. Everything will be forgotten.
â Everything?
â Everything.
â Whyâs that?
â Itâs sort of a natural⌠A law of nature.
â A rule?
â Yeah.
âOslo, August 31stâ
â Itâs the only theme. The passing of time.
â Youâre young and still think thereâs something out there, floating⌠that resembles dreams. And there isnât.
[âŚ]
Letâs not discuss tastes. How could we ever understand each other? Itâs like a 17th century knight meeting a rock singer. Young people like impossible things. And older people, the simplest. Itâs like flying: when youâre young, you think you can fly. That your car just flies away. Flies away, I donât know⌠from this country, from this bathroom, from this world. The whole point of fucking you was to fly with your wings⌠fly a little while. To get a little taste of youth.
[âŚ]
â Real politicians make me sick. They deceive people.
â You think people want to know the truth. Theyâd rather be deceived.
â You canât be happy if you donât lie to yourself?
As for music being a comforting thing in times such as these, Iâm sure it is for those who arenât too depressed to still enjoy it. But music canât compare with alcohol or drugs, which directly affect oneâs emotional state as opposed to musicâs indirect effect through our sense of hearing and never fail to provide an escape. Like literature, music is just a harmless form of forgetting the world and doesnât always work as well as weâd like.
Thomas Ligotti â The Damned Interviews, Tina Hall
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one. But it takes a lot of time and money, and the bulb has got to really want to change.
Sala samobĂłjcĂłw / Suicide Room
The park is now empty and bare[đĄ], with an abandoned chain about it. The jungle gym, the slide and swing have rusted together. Theyâre all so terribly alone now. Where did all the children go? Didnât they know that the park needed them?
A childâs intelligent heart can fathom the depth of many dark places. But can it fathom the delicate moment of its own detachment?
Detachment
I realized something today. Iâm a non-person, Sarah. You shouldnât be here. Iâm not here. You may see me, but Iâm hollow.
Detachment
When youâre walking down the hallway, or in class, how many of you have ever felt the weight pressing down on you? Hmm? I have. Everyone? Wow. Poe wrote about these things over a hundred years ago. So, as we read, we can see that âThe House of Usherâ is not merely an old decrepit castle in disrepair. Itâs also a state of being.
ÂŤDuring the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was â but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I looked upon the simple landscape of the domain â upon the bleak walls â upon the white trunks of decayed trees â with an utter depression of soul. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart.Âť
Detachment; Henry teaching âThe Fall of the House of Usherâ by Edgar Allan Poe
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
You can imagine, a seventeen-year-old, itâs 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[đĄ]
This is a strange, rather perverse, story, just to put it in very simple terms. Itâs a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we donât have, on things we donât need, to create impressions that wonât last, on people we donât care about.
Tim Jacksonâs 2010 TED talk
â It seems that the only happy people in this movie by the end, are slightly crazy, and they are the course of future Mr. and Mrs. Wunch â a lovely name â and theyâre the ones who donât believe that you may even need happiness in the present life. So, everyone else seems to be left miserable, and Iâm curious if this is if you are being playful with this, or if this is a serious comic commentary on what life looks to you at this point.
â This is my perspective, and has always been my perspective on life. I have a very grim pessimistic view of it; I always have, since I was a little boy, it hasnât gotten worse with age or anything: I do feel that itâs a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies, and deceive yourself. And Iâm not the first person to say this or the most articulate person on it: it was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud, it was said by Eugene OâNeill⌠One must have oneâs delusions to live: if you look at life too honestly and clearly, life does become unbearable because itâs a pretty grim enterprise, you will admit. So, I do feel that those two people are the only two people that are happy: they are capable of deluding themselves; if I saw them at a party in real life I would think that they were foolish people, and dumb, and silly, and I would laugh at them, but they would be happier than me. So that is the way I feel about it.
Woody Allen at Cannes Film Festival Press conference for âYou Will Meet a Tall Dark Strangerâ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yVPS8XBoBE[đĄ]
We live in a decadent civilisation which robs us of our ability to shape and define our destiny and hence robs us of our spirit and identity. Western man has been gradually separated from his natural environment, his spirituality, his fellow man and finally from himself. Life has been reduced to an animalistic base as we drift from one empty satisfaction of technological convenience to another.
Art and culture no longer carry any grand or heroic ideals but rather seek to stimulate base emotions through ugly and abstract forms. Art and culture rarely serve as little more than distractions from the torment of perception â no longer seeking to order, interpret or explain the world around us but preferring instead to excuse it, replace it or deny it with an increasingly less interactive and more atomised and abstract alternative.
We were promised technological salvation but have been led to an air-conditioned hell by the false idols of progress who sought to remove the struggle from existence, not stopping to think what would be left. For life in essence is struggle and the will to participate in that struggle and make it oneâs own is the most sacred characteristic of man.
The Harsh Noise Wall[đĄ] is the soundtrack to our spiritually vacuous and culturally bankrupt age. There is no struggle here. There is no spirit. No personality. No society. There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere to progress. This is the end product. This is the end.
âA View From Nihilâ in âTriumph of the Broken Willâ
Never play by the stairs, youâre bound to fall down, Never play by the hillside, might slip and break your crown Never play by the fire, itâs a danger to your health Never play by the wall, might fall and break yourself.
Never play by the river, you might tumble in and drown, Never play by the field, get filthy, dirty and brown, Never play by yourself, itâs a danger to be alone, Never stray too far away, itâs not safe outside of home.
I didnât ask to be born, And I donât think Iâll ask to die. I didnât ask for the ground beneath my feet, I didnât ask for the sky.
Emily & the Woods â Never Play
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 misâlabelled as a Japanese proverb.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
It takes two to have a child, but you think alone.
Alessandro Bergonzoni
â âŚbecause next year youâre not going to see me, you know.
â Oh, so you are in fact retiring. Lucky you, profâŚ
â What?! You shouldnât say such a thing, you are young!
An ex-classmate
Youth is beauty and beauty is youth. And thatâs all you need to know.
Bruce in âBeautiful Kateâ
Nature is Satanâs church.
Antichrist (2009), Lars von Trier
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 â âSum: Forty Tales from the Afterlivesâ
Itâs really not that hard to understand people: you just have to not listen to them and âlookâ at their appearance.
Grotteschi e arabeschi (Grotesques and Arabesques) â Vitaliano Trevisan
r/IAmA, u/BetterAlone
I am a guy with âcovertâ Schizoid Personality Disorder. That is, I donât give a damn about people and prefer to stay alone and self-sufficient but I fake extroversion to get by.
[âŚ]
Problem is, I also like to accomplish stuff (entirely for my own sense of internal satisfaction) and I need other people to do that. So I fake extroversion and interest in other people even if I donât give a fuck. This actually exacerbates my pre-existing sense of existential isolation, since it shows how easily people can be handled.
I have been defined as âbubblyâ and âcharismaticâ. Absurd.
[âŚ]
[deleted user]
deep down I actually feel a desperate need for love and friendship
HahahaâŚoh, no you donât, you only think you do. Youâll eventually just be disappointed/bored by it if you do find it, and discard it like every other social function you have encountered. Iâm sure you have already tossed potential friendships away simply because you became uninterested after a few days/weeks, so you know what I mean.
What I think that people like us are actually feeling, is the hollowness of our egocentric fantasies which we wrap our minds in. Our ideal level of emotional interaction is so completely removed from reality that it is literally unobtainable. I think that intellectually we realize this, so it causes some angst, if only because we think that we will likely never be able to fulfill our fantasy.
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Obligation of worn-out dialogue to the bitter end Itâs invoked by those who retreat, dodged by those who advance Everyone is self-sufficient, yet the numbers donât add up
PGR â Cronache di guerra II (âWar Chronicles IIâ)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Certainly, the circumstances are not favorable; when have they ever been, really⌠One ought to⌠One ought to nothing: one ought to what is, one ought to the present.
PGR â Cronaca montana (âMountain Chronicleâ)
You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your mommy, your daddy, your nature pajamas. You love everything, donât ya? Yeah. But you know what, buddy? As you get older⌠some of the things that you love might not seem so special anymore, you know? Like your jack-in-the-box. Maybe youâll realize itâs just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal⌠And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe itâs only one or two things. With me, I think itâs one.
The Hurt Locker â James speaking to his son
Future will be the past of the present.
Title of an ambient piece by âJonsonâ (Harald Karla)
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 MarĂas
â That was amazing. I wish I could play.
â Take lessons. Youâd enjoy playing. If you knew more, you wouldnât have such a high opinion of my playing.
Elegy
(At the zoo.)
â What do you see?
â Animals.
â Prisoners, held in a cage like us in a world without risk, or struggle, or danger. The only difference is that they are able to see the bars, and that takes away any hope of escape.
Choke / Soffocare
Where are the hopes, where are the dreams? My Cinderella story scene
Avril Lavigne and Butch Walker â The Best Damn Thing
Thereâs no RL, only AFK.
If you donât read the newspaper, youâre uninformed. If you read the newspaper, youâre mis-informed.
Often attributed to Mark Twain, but origin unverified
â The ceiling is probably the last thing people see. At least for 90% of the people who die. Probably. And if you die, the last thing you see will be printed in your eye. Like a photograph. Imagine all those people with ceilings in their eyes.
Water Lilies / Naissance des Pieuvres
No Love, No Hate, No Faith, No Memory
Mayhem â Ordo ad Chao
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. Itâs just that itâs 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 youâre 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 âJollyâ Lamberti â Jollypower
You know, Kyon⌠have you ever realized just how insignificant your existence on this planet really is? [âŚ] It happened to me. And Iâll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didnât really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there.
So I turned to my dad and asked him, âDo you know how many people are here right nowâ? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, Iâd learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population.
Up till then, I always thought that I was, I donât know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasnât true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If thereâs really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasnât ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasnât I that person? So, thatâs how I felt till I finished elementary school.
And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldnât come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. Iâd let the world know I wasnât a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And Iâve done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.
Haruhi in âThe Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiyaâ
Do I need to be in love? What is there otherwise from loving? Just takes a face To make everything else eraseâŚ
Trespassers William â My Hands Up
I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that thatâs not the answer.
Jim Carrey, Ottawa Citizen, December 2005
âť
Iâve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame, so that they could see that itâs not where youâre 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 donât let anybody tell you different.
Kurt Vonnegut â A Man Without a Country
Big city life Here my heart have no base And right now Babylon de âpon me case
People in a show, All lined in a row. We just push on by, Itâs funny, How hard we try.
[âŚ]
Soon our work is done, All of us, one by one. Still, we live our lives, As if all this stuff survives.
[âŚ]
I find myself in a big city prison Arisen from the vision of mankind
Designed, to keep me discreetly Neatly in the corner
[âŚ]
Mattafix â Big City Life
But you canât 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
â Do you still ask God for help?
â Certainly.
â And do you still feel lonely?
â Yes, I still do. I still do.
â Isnât that really sad?
â Yes, thatâs really sad.
But so is my life.
Galina Ustvolskaya in âScream into Spaceâ
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1570198[đĄ]
No matter what one does, there is never enough time.
Invisible
Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they donât have such distant goals as us, the white brotherhood. The East is⌠If you are moving, then you are on the right path.Âť While for us, the path doesnât matter â only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. Iâll be able to enter the Present time.
The point is â to stop thinking. These days, we have too much information about everything. Internet, TV, radio⌠You can find out what goes on in the States at any given point.
For me drugs arenât a specific substance: theyâre anything that youâre addicted to. When you lose what youâve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. Iâve accepted that all these âgodsâ we have, theyâre all teachers. There is one god â they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva â they are one god, who creates in three different ways.
I think we are on this planet for too short a time to waste it. And so, I live every day. From beginning to end, I experience it. I try to do everything I possibly can, take every kind of drug I could, toâŚ
WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: ÂŤIâm sleeping!Âť So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. Thatâs why I wonât quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise Iâll die of boredom. But I donât have a sense of security, stability, that I could have a lasting relationship, with a future. A junkie pays more attention to himself. All of us are little âNarcissiâ, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: ÂŤWhatâs the point?!Âť If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper⌠Itâs kind of idyllic. Thatâs why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, thatâs why there is art.
Kamen Petrov in âInvisibleâ
Her [ed. his motherâs] life was a failure, her marriage was a failure⌠And Iâm a part of that failure. Thatâs probably how she sees it. And she wants to start over, but she doesnât know how. You know what she does? She got an apartment, and she started decorating it in white and pink. Tsk! Why!? Total utopia.
What I mean is⌠She is starting with the things that should come last.
Invisible
Are you lost or incomplete? Do you feel like a puzzle, you canât find your missing piece? Tell me, how do you feel? Well, I feel like theyâre talking in a language I donât speak And theyâre talking it to me
Coldplay â Talk
I saw your face in a crowded place and I donât know what to do âcause Iâll never be with you
James Blunt â Youâre Beautiful
I donât give a fuck about a job in the city I inject rap into my veins
Fabri Fibra â Rap in vena (âRap Into My Veinsâ)
Arisen in vain to a life, Bleeding inner to suffer with time. Endlessly lost and still searching For something; somedayâŚ
Obsession & deceit
To burn a mark for a lifetime.
Boundaries to brake,
Reached from the edge of time.
To rebuild the past
For something that will everlast.
Just searching for to find itself
In still-motion.
[âŚ]
Serve the frail mind, Escape through the lifetime To glance for your dismal youth.
Get closer, Closer to your own faith.
Shape of Despair â Still-Motion
I used to feel⌠I used to sense what were Inside of me To feel waves of difference Waves which brought me to live I enjoyed this life in me Breathing and feeling Burning and suffocating Didnât curse the hour Which gave birth to me Didnât curse another life When bearing death inside
Now all things I do bear Are all gone and free This, myself⌠Now fleeing around death Cursing the hour And another life⌠Which whom I used to care Now⌠Watching myself My own life Fading to afar⌠Listening these voices And trying to tell them That I will soon be gone
Shape of Despair â Curse Life
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 â Part 1. Baby Itâs Cold Outside
People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes. They think they do but they donât. If youâre the depressed type now, thatâs the way youâll always be. If youâre the mindless happy type now, thatâs the way youâll be when you grow up. You might lose some weight, your face may clear up, get a body tan, breast enlargement, a sex change, it makes no difference. Essentially, from in front, from behind. Whether you are 13 or 50, youâll always be the same.
Palindromes; also quoted in Morgondagen by Apati
There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didnât they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And itâs the same old lesson: everything in this life â I repeat, everything â is more trouble than itâs worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. Thereâs a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.
Thomas Ligotti â âFantastic Metropolisâ interview
People canât 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 âhorrifyingâ event. People forget there is such a thing as memory, and that when a wound âhealsâ 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, âLet the scarring begin.â
George Carlin â 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 âthe dayâ. No, it was âcause youth is good: thatâs gone, youâre fucked; itâs not the day. And then they reject anything thatâs new, itâs like we do with fucking hip-hop, if youâre in your 30s: ÂŤOh, fuck that, that ainât music, we had music back when 38 Special was aroundâŚÂť What? No. Letâs all fucking kill ourselves for the hypocrisy, right?
Doug Stanhope â Deadbeat Hero
The worst thing that can happen to a man who spends a lot of time alone, is to lack imagination. Life, already dull and repetitive in itself, becomes, without fantasy, a morbid spectacle.
The Consequences of Love, Paolo Sorrentino
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)
You can change your face But canât change your mind No matter what you do
Benny Benassi â No Matter What You Do
While my heart is sinking I do not want my voice to go out into the air
The Innocence Mission â Tomorrow On The Runway
So depressing was the subject of the human condition that humans learnt to avoid even acknowledging its existence, despite the fact that it was the real issue before us as a species. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point in his now-famous line, âAbout that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.â (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ch.7, 1921).
Jeremy Griffith â A Species In Denial (introduction)
The age-old development of consciousness Drives us away from the essence of life We meditate too much so that our instincts will fade away They fade away
Whatâs the point of life And whatâs the meaning if we all die in the end? Does it make sense to learn or do we forget everything?
Epica â The Phantom Agony
Chance doesnât exist But the path of life is not totally so predestined Time and chronology show us how all should be In the ways of existence To find out why we are here
Being conscious is a torment[đĄ] The more we learn is the less we get Every answer contains a new quest A quest to non existence, a journey with no end
No one surveys the whole, focus on things so small But lifeâs objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesnât exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
Iâm not afraid to die Iâm afraid to be alive without being aware of it
Iâm so afraid to, I couldnât stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we donât grasp the meaning of our programmed course of life Our future has already been wasted by us alone And we just let it happen and do not worry at all
We only fear what comes And smell death every day Search for the answers that lie beyond
Epica â Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
Oh, you humor me today Calling me out to play With your telescope eyes, metal teeth I canât be seen with you, you freak
Go cry, go run away Let your short legs carry you away With your big dress and your dirty hair Your penâs waiting for you Just get far, far away from me I donât want your disease
Please donât make me cry Please donât make me cry Iâm just like you I know you know Iâm just like you So leave me alone
Dear Matthew why canât you see Youâre just not near enough like me With your telescope eyes, metal teeth I canât be seen with you
Eisley â Telescope Eyes
When youâre all alone in the lands of forever, Lay under the Milky Way, On and on, itâs getting too late out, Iâm not in love this time this night.
Canât help it if I space in a daze, My eyes tune out the other way, I may switch off and go in a daydream, In this head my thoughts are deep, Sometimes I canât even speak, Would someone be and not pretend? Iâm off again in my world
Avril Lavigne and Clifton Magness â My World
What if I forget your face? I couldnât even dream of you
Trespassers William â Flicker
Time destroys all things.
IrrĂŠversible
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 (âThe Dark Sideâ) (2002)
You say the drinking is better than a woman And you say the thinking takes too much time Well God save your children should you have them For, to you, thereâs nothing if thereâs no wine
BĂ´a â Drinking
I am the axis in the wheel of reincarnation The endless singularity
Thorns â Vortex
Nothing left to feel nor to understand.
I did not want to live my life. Nor did I even want to live for my deathâŚ
Shape of Despair â âŚTo Live for My DeathâŚ
Nothing left to feel nor to understand.
Shape of Despair â âŚTo Live for My DeathâŚ
â Oh, was I mean? You canât take it? The happening chick that you are?
â Lizzie, Iâm not crying because youâre mean. I just canât imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.
Prozac Nation
â Youâre a⌠youâre a bit of a thinker, arenât you?
â I donât know.
â Well, you are.
Lost and Delirious â Mary and the gardener
The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.
Michel Houellebecq â Platform
[âŚ] every living creature on Earth dies alone.
Donnie Darko
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Children of the workers Children of the tradesmen Children of those who matter, and of those who never will
C.S.I. â Tutti giĂš per terra (All Fall to the Ground)
âWhat surprises you most about mankind?â
God answered:
âThat 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.â
Often misattributed to the Dalai Lama; from âAn Interview with Godâ by James J. Lachard (pen name of James J. Brown), early 2000s â wording may not match the original exactly.
We pass the time of day to forget how time passes.
AmĂŠlie â Hipolito (the writer)
No to the solution when you are the problem
Cripple Bastards â Morte da tossico (âDeath of the Addictâ)
We live with our dreams, but in the end, only the truth remains. And unfortunately we understand it only when we are gone.
Family Pack / Que faisaient les femmes pendant que lâhomme marchait sur la lune?
Some people are alive simply because itâs against the law to kill them.
Variations:
Many people are alive only because itâs illegal to shoot them.
The law against murder is the number one thing preventing murder. Louis C.K.
[âŚ]
You stand before the final dimension, and I am the darkness of eternityâŚ
[âŚ] All life bears death from birth. Life fears death, but lives only to die. It starts with anxiety. Anxiety becomes fear. Fear leads to anger⌠anger leads to hate⌠hate leads to suffering⌠The only cure for this fear is total destruction. Kuja was a victim of his own fear. He concluded he could only save himself by destroying the origin of all things â the crystal.
[âŚ]
âŚNow, the theory is undeniable. Kujaâs action proves it. All things live to perish. At last, life has uncovered this truth. Now, it is time to end this world.
[âŚ]
I exist for one purpose⌠To return everything back to the zero world, where there is no life and no crystal to give life. In a world of nothing, fear does not exist. This is the world that all life desires.
[âŚ]
Foolish creature⌠Your fears have already deluded you. One day, you will choose destruction over existence, as Kuja did. When he sought to destroy the crystal, the purpose of life ended. Now, comeâŚ
Necron, Final Fantasy IX
For living on in others, in memories and dreams Is not enough You want everything Another world Where the birds always sing
The Cure â Where the Birds Always Sing
Dear life, when I said âcan my day get any worse,â it was a rhetorical question, not a challenge.
Unkown source
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.
Patrick Bateman in American Psycho
Your fears of death covered up by the words âSuicide is weakâ
Abyssic Hate
You and me, baby, ainât nothinâ but mammals So letâs do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
Bloodhound Gang â The Bad Touch
Iâd like to share a revelation that Iâve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that youâre not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. Youâre a plague and we are the cure.
Agent Smith in âThe Matrixâ
You know, I know this steak doesnât exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
Cypher in âThe Matrixâ
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
Agent Smith in âThe Matrixâ
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: Youâve never used them before.
The Matrix
(In the psychiatric hospital)
Susanna: But what if you donât have a secret?
Lisa: Then youâre a lifer, like me.
âGirl, Interruptedâ
I am Ultimecia. Time shall compress, all existence deniedâŚ
Reflect on your childhood: your sensation, your words, your emotionsâŚ
Time⌠It will not wait.
No matter how hard you hold on. It escapes you.
And⌠[And youâre going to die. / And everything will be destroyed.]
Ultimecia (Artemisia), Final Fantasy VIII
Right and wrong are not what separate us and our enemies. Itâs our different standpoints, our perspectives that separate us. Both sides blame one another. Thereâs no good or bad side. Just two sides holding different views.
Squall Leonhart in Final Fantasy VIII
â You live in the uncertainty of freedom, we live in the eternal confinement. But what can be seen once the barriers of the ego are destroyed, isnât the same for both sides?
A Shumi at the Shumi village, Final Fantasy VIII (in the marvelous Italian version, re-translated to English by me)
Original English version:
The so-called âpsychotically depressedâ person who tries to kill herself doesnât do so out of quote âhopelessnessâ or any abstract conviction that lifeâs 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 fireâs flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. Itâs not desiring the fall; itâs terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling âDonât!â and âHang on!â, can understand the jump. Not really. Youâd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
David Foster Wallace, The Depressed Person
Anyway, I can try anything, itâs the same circle leading to nowhere, and Iâm tired now. Anyway, Iâve lost my face, my dignity, my look, everything is gone and Iâm tired now. Donât be scared: Iâve found a good job and I go to work every day on my old bicycle you loved.
I am piling up some unread books under my bed and I really think Iâll never read again. No concentration, just a white disorder everywhere around me, you know⌠Iâm so tired now. Donât worry: I often go to dinners and parties with some old friends who care for me, take me back home, and stay.
Monochrome floors, monochrome walls; only absence near me, nothing but silence around me. Monochrome flat, monochrome life; only absence near me, nothing but silence around me.
Sometimes I search an event or something to remind me, but Iâve really got nothing in mind. Sometimes I open the windows, I listen people walking in the down street; there is life out there.
Yann Tiersen â Monochrome (ft. Dominique A)
â I can read peopleâs minds. In my lifetime I have read the pasts, presents, and futures of thousands upon thousands of men and women.
[âŚ]
And each mind that I peered into was stuffed with the same single object of obsession. That selfish and atavistic desire to pass on oneâs seed⌠it was enough to make me sick. Every living thing on this planet exists to mindlessly pass on their DNA. Weâre designed that way. And thatâs why there is war.
But you⌠you are different⌠Youâre the same as us. We have no past, no future. We live in the moment. Thatâs our only purpose.
Humans werenât designed to bring each other happiness. From the moment weâre thrown into this world, weâre fated to bring each other nothing but pain and misery.
Psycho Mantisâ dying words in âMetal Gear Solidâ (PSX)
â Would you still love me if I couldnât play?
â What?
â Would you still love me if I couldnât play?
â You wouldnât be you, if you couldnât play.
â No, I want to know.
â Our bodies sway to music. ÂŤOh, brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?Âť
â But donât you wish, sometimes, that you couldnât play, that you could just be ordinary?
â Like what? Live in the country? Making bread? Feeding chickens? Playing once a year with a bunch of amateurs?
â How dare you insult my sister like thatâŚ
â I wasnât insulting her.
â Well, at least she chose her life. Not like you and me. Weâre just trained freaks.
Hilary and Jackie, the movie about Jacqueline du PrĂŠ
â But dad, youâre talking, like, in 25 years. Sorry, but Iâd rather be happy now than in 25 years.
â Sure, youâre right. Perhaps itâs not much of a comfort at the moment. But anywayâŚ
â âCause in 25 years⌠Thatâs, like, 25 years. It doesnât exist.
Show Me Love / Fucking Ă mĂĽl
Donât say Iâm out of touch with this rampant chaos â your reality. I know well what lies beyond my sleeping refuge: the nightmare I built my own world to escape.
Evanescence â Imaginary
Dear world⌠I have confusion around me in every direction from my brain. Iâve tried and tried to make it here in this fucking world⌠but I think it was a mistake that I was ever born. I do not feel guilty about taking my own life. Iâve tried your ways. Iâve had a job since I was thirteen years old. Making a living was never a real problem for me. The problem was all I see is misery and darkness. Die, die, die. Iâll put a gun to my fucking head right now.
Gummo
Peoples got to work for a livinâ. I believe in a blue-collar race. I think suicideâs the only way out[đĄ] â out of life. I wanted to die. I tried to die, but I didnât. They say itâs my depression, but what the fuck, man? I donât fuckinâ know anymore. Which way should I fuckinâ turn, man?
Gummo
I knew a guy who was dyslexic⌠but he was also cross-eyed⌠so everything came out right.
Gummo
On the Highwind, near the ending
Cloud: Iâve⌠been thinking too. About the universe⌠planet⌠ocean. How wide and big⌠No matter where I go and what I do it wonât change a thing.
Cid: Maybe youâre right. But I came up with something different. I always thought this planet was so huge. But lookinâ at it from space, I realized itâs so small. Weâre just floatinâ in the dark. Kind of makes you feel powerless. [âŚ] Thatâs why I say this planetâs still a kid. A little kid sick and trembling in the middle of this huge universe. [âŚ]
Vincent: City of the Ancients⌠The Ancients⌠after a long time that is probably what others will come to call us⌠HmmâŚhwa ha ha ha⌠Itâs only a matter of time for us.
Final Fantasy VII
A womanâs shoulders are the front lines of her mystique, and her neck, if sheâs alive, has all the mystery of a border town. A no-manâs land in that battle between the mind and the body.
The Devilâs Advocate
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era, the broken dream of the belle ĂŠpoque. 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
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Flaming, astonished souls When torn is the veil of blindness
[âŚ]
Beauty appears, never intrusive nor lazy Languid when itâs time, strong, light, and austere The air serene, brimming with strength
C.S.I. â Brace (Ember)
Athletes
[âŚ]
But itâs better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing⌠the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in oneâs mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way âup close and personalâ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human lifeâoutside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore whatâs obvious, that most of this straining is farce. Itâs farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a childâs world, is very small⌠[Tennis player] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way⌠Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, itâs too late for anything else; heâs invested too much, is in too deep. I think heâs both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.
David Foster Wallace, âThe String Theoryâ (July 1996, Esquire)
Choose life; choose a job; choose a career; choose a family; choose a fucking big television; choose washing machines, cars, Compact Disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance; choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments; choose a starter home; choose your friends! Choose leisurewear and matching luggage; choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics; choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning; choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish fucked up brats that youâve spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future; choose life.
But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life [âŚ]
âť
[âŚ] the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the Compact Disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three-piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.
Trainspotting, intro and ending
Shut me in, Levante. Shut me in.
Libero (Massimo Ceccherini) inside the casket, in The Cyclone
The only unbearable thing, is that nothing is unbearable.
Arthur Rimbaud in âTotal Eclipseâ by Christopher Hampton
You know how I know itâs the end of the world? Because everythingâs been done, every kind of musicâs been tried, every governmentâs been tried, every fuckinâ hairstyle. How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake?
Max Peltier in âStrange Daysâ
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
The Liarsâ Club â 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 â 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 wonât 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 âThe World as Will and Representationâ. 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 (âAutograph of a Portraitâ)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Any so-called âknow-it-allâ expertise is bullshit, and any problem is a false problem. For once, on this show, weâre really talking about bullshit, finally! Itâs about time!, to recognize that weâre always talking bullshit. Tonight weâre saying itâs not just tonight that itâs bullshit, but that weâre always just talking words â that is, bullshit.
Carmelo Bene at the Maurizio Costanzo Show (âUno contro tuttiâ special)
And time will destroy all those as well. Why do people insist on creating things that will inevitably be destroyed? Why do people cling to life, knowing that they must someday die? âŚKnowing that none of it will have meant anything once they do?
[âŚ]
Bleh! You people make me sick! You sound like lines from a self-help book! If thatâs how itâs going to be⌠Iâll snuff them all out! Every last one of your sickening, little happy reasons for living!
Kefka, Final Fantasy VI, in its GBA translation by Tom Slattery
Well, well Iâm young Iâm a young girl Well, I mean⌠Iâm a young woman And then, I guess, Iâll just be a woman Not too young Not too old Just right Right in the middle Just about right in the middle
And then, well⌠Well, I guess Iâll get a little older, God willing Guess Iâll just get A wee bit older And then Iâll be, yes Thatâs right: An older woman And as the years roll on and on and on Iâll keep on getting older, God willing
And then, well⌠Well, I guess Nothinâ for it Iâm gonna be If God wills it Yes, thatâs right: An old woman An old, old woman
And as the years roll on and on and on Iâll keep on getting older, God willing
But youâll still say Iâm beautiful Iâll still be beautiful inside And lovely to you, huh, baby? Lovely to you, huh, baby?
And Iâll say to them youngâuns: ÂŤHey, kids! Kids! Gather round, Gather round me, now.Âť
ÂŤWhen your grandfather and I were youngâŚÂť
And as the years roll on and on and on Iâll keep on getting older, God willing
ÂŤOh, mother, mother,Âť ÂŤHear me, father,Âť ÂŤCatch me when I fall!Âť And as the years roll on and on and on Iâll keep on getting older, God willingâŚ
Rebecca Pidgeon â Grandmother
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. Itâs whatâs known as he law of the marketâ. 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 victorsâ 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 â Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte)
â Have you ever seen a dead body?
â Only me own.
Naked
In the beginning of time, there was darkness. While I lay resting in my motherâs womb, I soon became a part of the light world; young in body, evil at heart. With little love around, I became aware of death. I should have been executed early in life for the crimes my mind commits daily.
Resurrection â Disembodies; then sampled by âDelta 9â in âMortifiedâ, and used in âTricky Madness 2â by Krinkels
As the taxi took me through the city to the station, I felt as though Iâd been dropped onto another planet, a cruel and hostile place. Inclined by character to silence and reflection, Iâd always been repulsed by noise and uproar, by any manifestation of the excessive merriment that so often borders on violence. Iâd always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it.
The LĂźneburg Variation â Paolo Maurensig
Thereâs 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
Under neon loneliness everlasting nothingness
Manic Street Preachers â Motorcycle Emptiness
Mitch: You ever been in love?
Curly: Once. I was driving a herd across the panhandle. Texas. I donât know⌠Passed near this little dirt farm right about sundown. Out in the field was this young woman, working down in the dirt. Just about then, she stood up to stretch her back. Ah⌠Ah⌠She was wearing a little cotton dress, and the settinâ sun was right behind her, showing the shape that God gave her.
Mitch: What happened?
Curly: Ah! I just turned around and rode away.
Mitch: Why?
Curly: I figured it wasnât gonna get any better than that.
Mitch: Yeah, but you could have been, you know⌠with her.
Curly: Iâve been with lots of womenâŚ
Mitch: Yeah, but you know, she could have been the love of your life.
Curly: She is.
[âŚ]
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
Mitch: No, what?
Curly: *points index finger skyward* This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else donât mean shit.
Mitch: Thatâs great, but⌠whatâs the âone thing?â
Curly: *smiles and points his finger at Mitch* Thatâs what you gotta figure out.
City Slickers
That one passion, that all-encompassing passion that saves a lot of men, whatever that happens to be for a given individual, and that a lot of unlucky ones will never find in all their life.
And you are not me The lengths that I will go to The distance in your eyes Oh no Iâve said too much I set it up
[âŚ]
Trying to keep up with you
And I donât know if I can do it
R.E.M â Losing My Religion
And so with just a touch of our fingers We could make our circuitry explode All we ever wanted Was just to come in from the cold
[âŚ]
We really thought we had a purpose We were so anxious to achieve We had hope The world held promise For a slave To liberty
[âŚ]
When I thought life had some meaning Then I thought I had some choice (I was running blind) And I made some value judgments In a self-important voice (I was outa line) But then absurdity came over me And I longed to lose control (into no mind) Oh all I ever wanted Was just to come in from the cold
Joni Mitchell â Come In From The Cold
A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.
Peter Wessel Zapffe â âThe Humorous Pessimistâ, documentary
And did you know desireâs a terrible thing The worst that I can find
[âŚ]
Did you know desireâs a terrible thing It makes the world go blind
The Sundays â Canât Be Sure
Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.
Karl Kraus
Hope is the last thing to die⌠but itâs 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 â Doinâ It Again
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
If you donât remove the world as will and representation, this mania⌠The principle of individuation by which we wake up in the morning, we want to kill ourselves, then two or three coffees are enough, and off we go, back to deceive, to kill time.
Carmelo Bene at the Maurizio Costanzo Show
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
For me, the fuller the [theatre] halls are, the emptier they are.
Carmelo Bene, on various occasions
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isnât thinking isnât thinking of
They Might Be Giants â Where Your Eyes Donât Go
Madness is the emergency exit⌠you can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away⌠forever.
Joker in Alan Mooreâs âBatman: The Killing Jokeâ
Iâm not interested in solving the ills of society. I donât want to save the world. I donât even want to save me⌠I think most talk is so boring; I mean: save this, do that, do this⌠I think weâre all so boring saying everything we donât even wanna save ourselves, weâre so boring talking about it. Thereâs nothing left to save, weâre so fucking boring. Let it die, I say. Let there be a new beginning. Itâs awful. Goodnight.
Charles Bukowski â Let There Be A New Beginning
Tully: You know, in the guest house, you could write in peace.
Henry: Hey, Tully baby⌠Nobody who could write worth a damn could ever write in peace, JesusâŚ
Barfly
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
Barfly
Henry: Hey, you donât believe in that crap, do you?
Wanda: Sure. The more crap you believe in, the more better off you are.
Barfly
And then it happened⌠a door opened to a world⌠rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addictâs veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought⌠a board is found. ÂŤThis is it⌠this is where I belongâŚÂť
The Conscience of a Hacker â The Mentor
Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
David T. Wolf, as quoted by Robert Byrne, in The Third â And Possibly the Best â 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said
From the sketch to the work one travels on oneâs knees.
Vladimir Holan; quoted by Kundera in âThe art of the novelâ
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway â The Garden of Eden
Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.
Emil Cioran â Anathemas and Admirations
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
I feel good, I feel bad, I donât know what to do I donât study, I donât work, I donât watch TV I donât go to the movies, I donât play sports
CCCP â Io sto bene (I Feel Good)
So how are you, then If I may ask, what are you up to in that modernity that just seems real?
Le cose che pensano (The Things That Think) â Pasquale Panella for Lucio Battisti
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 âninety-ninety ruleâ in software engineering.
After you finish the first 90% of a project, you have to finish the other 90%.
Shorter and more general variant.
[âŚ] 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 âschools,â [âŚ]
âThe Abolition of Workâ, Bob Black
Bill Hicks
Thereâs a club, if youâd like to go You could meet somebody who really loves you So you go, and you stand on your own And you leave on your own And you go home, and you cry, and you want to die
When you say itâs gonna happen now Well, when exactly do you mean? See, Iâve already waited too long And all my hope is gone
The Smiths â âHow Soon Is Now?â
I was looking for a job, and then I found a job And heaven knows Iâm miserable now
The Smiths â Heaven Knows Iâm Miserable Now
â What is the Nothing?
â Itâs the emptiness thatâs left. Itâs like a despair, destroying this world, and I have been trying to help it.
The NeverEnding Story
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
Kundera â The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(Facing a huge ghost)
â Sorry, Venkman. Iâm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.
Egon in âGhostbustersâ
All around me are familiar faces worn out places, worn out faces Bright and early for their daily races going nowhere, going nowhere Their tears are filling up their glasses no expression, no expression Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow no tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad The dreams in which Iâm dying are the best Iâve ever had I find it hard to tell you âcause I find it hard to take When people run in circles itâs a very very mad world
Children waiting for the day they feel good happy birthday, happy birthday Made to feel the way that every child should sit and listen, sit and listen Went to school and I was very nervous no one knew me, no one knew me Hello teacher, tell me whatâs my lesson look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad The dreams in which Iâm dying are the best Iâve ever had I find it hard to tell you âcause I find it hard to take When people run in circles itâs a very very mad world
[âŚ]
Tears For Fears â Mad World
Itâs no longer a question of staying healthy. Itâs 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 â The Book of Disquiet
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves.
Fernando Pessoa â The Book of Disquiet
Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the otherâs 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 â of any person whatsoever â 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 thatâs hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever â attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or donât know â 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 â The Book of Disquiet
Everything wearies me, including what doesnât weary me. My happiness is as painful as my pain.
[âŚ]
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 objectâs visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul.
Itâs as if my life amounted to being thrashed by it.
Fernando Pessoa â The Book of Disquiet
Iâm forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I canât 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 â only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa â 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 â Fernando Pessoa
There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which Iâm reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They donât always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But itâs as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of lifeâs certainty and exactness.
This used to irritate me, because I naĂŻvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact itâs only a reaction to something thatâs 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 itâs 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 isnât superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamerâs 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
Thereâs no bad like a good man gone bad.
Charlie (Bud Spencer) in âWho Finds a Friend Finds a Treasureâ
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 â The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
God: he canât find us any better than Santa Claus.
The Blue Lagoon
The sentence, otherwise obvious, carries weight because of the context of the film, as it is spoken by castaway âchildrenâ.
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 â If on a winterâs night a traveler
Life is a state of mind.
Being There
Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.
[âŚ]
Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
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 â Women
Translated with the help of LLMs from the Florentine dialect (WTFPL).
We are that breed thatâs never quite alright, jump ditches by day, skip dinner by night. Iâll shout it loud till Iâm hoarse and dry: we barely get laid even though we try. Weâre the ones who pack the cinema tight, to see naked girls, jerkinâ off all night.
Yet nature still whispers, through valley and hill, that caterpillars can fly, if theyâve got the will. But weâre the breed that defies all the rules: born as worms⌠still worms we stay, like fools. Weâve been fucked by misery, went in raw, no glove: didnât pull out clean, now weâre stuck with bad love.
Bozzone in âBerlinguer, I Love Youâ (Giuseppe Bertolucci)
We are survival machines â robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Richard Dawkins â The Selfish Gene
â Well, you know, Iâve been observing you here now for the last four weeks, and I donât see any evidence of mental illness at all. And I think that youâve been trying to put us on, all this time.
â You know, what do you want me to do? *mimics crazy gestures* You know what I mean, is that it? Is that crazy enough for you? Want me to take a shit on the floor? Tsk! ChristâŚ
One Flew Over the Cuckooâs Nest
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 â Heidegger, Jaspers e il tramonto dellâOccidente (âHeidegger, Jaspers and the Decline of the Westâ)
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 â Factotum
The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.
Bruce Lee â Tao of Jeet Kune Do (posthumous)
â I saw the ocean, and I saw a mountain, and there were many people climbing up the mountain. It was like a procession. There was a lot of fog. I couldnât see it very clearly, but at the very top was Death.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
â Iâm so happy to meet you, Kaspar. Tell me, what was it like in that dark cellar of yours?
â Better than outside!
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
The unforgettable days in a manâs life number only five or six. The rest just fill up space.
Ennio Flaiano, Autobiografia del Blu di Prussia (âAutobiography of Prussian Blueâ)
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 âTempo Illustratoâ
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
Robert A. Heinlein â 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 lessâŚ
Emil Cioran â 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 â The Trouble With Being Born
A thought which is not secretly stamped by fatality is interchangeable, worthless, is merely thoughtâŚ
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
SatietyâI 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 â 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 â 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 â 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 â The Trouble With Being Born
âFor [Elohim] doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be openedâŚâ
No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understandingâthat is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too muchâŚ
Emil Cioran â 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 moveâŚ
Emil Cioran â 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. âI cannot meet you in your future,â he says to the others. âWe do not have a single moment in common.â 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 â 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 â 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 tombsâbetween a false promise and the end of all promises.
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
Emil Cioran â The Trouble With Being Born
Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. Iâve got several degrees. Call me Mr.
Charles Bukowski â South of No North
It seemed a man only had two choices â get in on the hustle or be a bum.
Charles Bukowski â South of No North
âŚto 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
Death belongs to the realm of faith â youâre right to believe you will die, mind you⌠It sustains you. If you didnât believe it, could you bear the life you have? If we couldnât totally rely on the certainty that it will end, how could you bear all this?
Jacques Lacan, conference at the UniversitĂŠ 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 â Invisible Cities
weâve all heard the old women who say, âoh, I think itâs just AWFUL what these young people do to themselves, all that dope and stuff! I think itâs terrible!â 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 â âhell, I worked HARD all my life!â (they think this is a virtue, but it only proves a man is a damn fool.)
Charles Bukowski â Tales of Ordinary Madness
[âŚ] human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.
Tom Robbins â Another Roadside Attraction
Man was invented by water to carry itself uphill.
Simplified version circulated across the Internet
Itâs not important âhow trueâ this is or isnât: 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.
Two useful lessons, of course: loneliness, isolation, exclusion on the one hand, then the continued distrust of the other caused by the loneliness, the isolation and the exclusion. And this as a child alreadyâŚ
My mother gave me away. I lay on a fishing cutter with a woman in Holland, in Rotterdam, for one year. My mother visited me every three or four weeks there. I donât think that she cared much for me then. This changed, however, later. I was one year old, we went to Vienna, but the distrust even continued when I was brought to my grandfather who really loved me, in contrast to my mother. Then the walks with him, all these figures, male figures; in my later books, this is always my grandfather on my motherâs side. But beside my grandfather, again and again, you are alone. You can only develop alone, you will always be alone, the consciousness that a leopard canât change its spots. Everything else is deception, doubt. It doesnât change⌠During the school days, completely alone. You have a neighbor at school and you are alone. You talk to people, you are alone. You have views, strange ones, your own, you are always alone. And if you write a book, or as I write books, then you are even more aloneâŚ
It is impossible to make oneself heard. Solitude and loneliness become increased loneliness, isolation. Finally, you change the scenes more and more quickly. One puts his trust in bigger and bigger cities, the small town is not sufficient anymore, not Vienna, not even London. You have to go to another country, you try to go here and there, foreign languages, is it Brussels? Or maybe Rome? And there you go. And you are always alone with yourself and your increasingly dreadful work.
Thomas Bernhard â âThree Daysâ, documentary
Words ruin oneâs thoughts, paper makes them ridiculous, and even while one is still glad to get something ruined and something ridiculous down on paper, oneâs 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
Aldrin: Beautiful view.
Armstrong: Isnât that something? Magnificent sight out here.
Aldrin: Magnificent desolation.
Also see William Shatnerâs trip to space.
Dark party bars, shiny Cadillac cars And the people on subways and trains Looking gray in the rain, as they stand disarrayed Oh, but people look well in the dark
And if you close the door The night could last forever Leave the sunshine out And say hello to never
All the people are dancing And theyâre having such fun I wish it could happen to me
Cause if you close the door Iâd never have to see the day again
The Velvet Underground â After Hours
I know what you must be saying to yourselves. If thatâs the way she feels about it why doesnât she just end it all? Oh, no. Not me. Iâm in no hurry for that final disappointment. For I know just as well as Iâm standing here talking to you, when that final moment comes and Iâm breathing my last breath, Iâll be saying to myself:
Is that all there is, is that all there is If thatâs all there is my friends, then letâs keep dancing Letâs break out the booze and have a ball If thatâs all there is
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller â Is That All There Is?
To suffer is to produce knowledge.
Emil Cioran â The New Gods (âLe Mauvais dĂŠmiurgeâ, literally âThe Evil Demiurgeâ)
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 [âŚ] is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
Alan Wilson Watts, Out of Your Mind: The Nature of Consciousness (posthumous, 1998)
Letâs suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream; and you would â naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams â 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, letâs have a surprise: letâs have a dream which isnât under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that i donât know what itâs 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 â Il Caos (âChaosâ), in âTempo Illustratoâ
We should give the sense of death back to people.
Partner â P.P. Pasolini
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
If you spend time with the most erudite ones, it doesnât mean that you get close to the absolute.
Carmelo Bene â Our Lady of the Turks
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary.
Carmelo Bene â Our Lady of the Turks
Were (say) Frankl to attempt to cure (say) Zapffe from his âexistential frustration,â âontological despairâ or âmetaphysic-melancholic clairvoyance,â the chances are that Zapffe (rather than âcuredâ) would be baffled by Franklâs sophomoric philosophizing. âYou may be psychologically healthier than I,â Zapffe would gladly admit, âbut 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 â reluctantly, but with cataclysmic consistency and sleepwalkerâs certainty â to realize that itâs all fantasy and delusions, divinely subsidized to put us at peace with our âsituation.â 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 naĂŻve, maladroit metaphysics, behind which â if you will permit me to speak your language for once â I see but the profoundest, most fundamental trauma, and that great universal repression which prevents all fatal insight into man and his âcosmic conditions,â 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.â The biosophist is fully aware of the many marvellous metaphysics offering âpeace in heart,â âreconciliation with the worldâ and âatonement with the almighty,â 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 â Herman Tønnessen
Happiness is for the pigs.
Title of the book by Herman Tønnessen
(Giuliana and her son, in front of the factories)
â Why is that smoke yellow?
â Because itâs poison.
â But then, if a little bird flies through it, it dies.
â Well, by now the little birds know, and they donât fly through it anymore.
Red Desert (âIl deserto rossoâ) â Final scene
â I havenât recovered. I never will. NeverâŚ
[âŚ]
â Donât say that. Calm down. What are you afraid of?
â The streets, the factories, the colors, the people⌠everything!
[âŚ]
â Thereâs something terrible about reality and i donât know what it is. No one will tell me. Even you donât help me, Corrado.
Giuliana in âRed Desertâ (âIl deserto rossoâ)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
We asked the woman if there was one thing she wanted more than anything else in life. She looked at us, puzzled. Then, in a half voice, she said: âTo sleep. Three days in a row.â âNothing else?â we asked. She nodded. âTo die,â she replied; and she wasnât joking.
Fazzoletti di terra (âPatches of Earthâ), a documentary by Giuseppe Taffarel about two elderly farmers from Val di Brenta.
â See how the smoke trembles in the roof hole? As if whimpering and afraid. Yet itâs only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesnât know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm, because of what they know and what they donât know.
The Virgin Spring / Jungfrukällan
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 Federnâs 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 â 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.
BĂŠla BartĂłk, 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. âMany 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.â 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 â Brave New World Revisited
In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
Jacques Lacan in an interview for âLâExpressâ
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
Allen Saunders, Readerâs 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. âHow is suffering to be avoided?â 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 â The Temptation to Exist
The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, youâre still a rat.
Various attributions
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
[âŚ] only in madness
can one be clear.
âPicassoâ â P.P. Pasolini
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
I have the courage. Itâs fear that gets the better of me.
Totò as Figaro in âFigaro qua, Figaro lĂ â (âFigaro Here, Figaro Thereâ)
In this game that weâre playing, we canât win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, thatâs all.
1984 â 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 â 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 donât understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighborâs woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eatâthese may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I donât 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 donât know⌠If youâve 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? Hardlyâit couldnât only be that. I seem to have heard the theory advanced that human beings live in order to eat, but Iâve never heard anyone say that they lived in order to make money. No. And yet, in some instances⌠No, I donât 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?âI donât know.
No Longer Human / A Shameful Life â Osamu Dazai
All human activities are equivalent and all are on the principle doomed to failure. [âŚ] Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
Being and Nothingness â 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-ExupĂŠry, The Little Prince
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; Readerâs 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. Theyâre 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 donât know how to fight this great enemy of Humanity, the downward perspective.
Erostratus â 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-ExupĂŠry â Wind, Sand and Stars
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 wouldnât 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 â 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 Thingâstark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thingâis 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 âBlack Man who will come and get you,â as we tell the children.
Benjamin De Casseres â Saint Tantalus, chapter âDisenchantment: Behind the arrasâ
Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.
Nikola Tesla, interviewed by OrrinâŻE.âŻDunlap 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? Itâs 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 â On the Heights of Despair
The worst part is wondering how youâll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where youâll 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 itâs 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 hasnât enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. Iâve never been able to kill myself.
Louis-Ferdinand CĂŠline, Journey to the End of the Night
[âŚ] that mutilation in which life loses something it never hadâthe futureâcertainly 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 â A Very Old Man
As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.
Heidegger â 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 â 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 RĂŠvolution SurrĂŠaliste
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 â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Iâm through with psychoanalysis. After having practiced it faithfully for six whole months, Iâm worse off than before. [âŚ]
I had put myself in the doctorâs hands with such trust that when he told me I was cured, I believed him completely and, on the contrary, I didnât believe in my pains, which still afflicted me. I said to them: âYouâre not real, after all!â But now there can be no doubt! Itâs them, all right! [âŚ]
[âŚ] 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 â Zenoâs 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 doesnât 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 â Zenoâs 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 doesnât tolerate therapies.
Italo Svevo â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Health doesnât analyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.
Italo Svevo â Zenoâs 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 â Zenoâs Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer (unconfirmed)
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 Devilâs Dictionary
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 â Arte e scienza (âArt and Scienceâ)
As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her [Anneâs] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten â a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that âw-a-t-e-râ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.
Helen Keller, in her autobiography âThe Story of My Lifeâ, recounting her experience as a deafblind child.
Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer â Studies on Hysteria
[âŚ] that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it; [âŚ]
George Bernard Shaw
Anyone who isnât born with the necessary wings will never grow them afterwards. Anyone who canât drop instinctively and at the right second like lead on prey will never learn, and thereâll be no point in his watching others who can, as heâll 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 oneâs fingers.
Italo Svevo â A Life
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome â 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 jealousyâah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
Friedrich Nietzsche â Beyond Good and Evil
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.[đĄ]
Friedrich Nietzsche â The Joyous Science
Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps? â To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is âin a hurry.â 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 â as a goldsmithâs 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 âwork,â that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, [âŚ]
Nietzsche â Dawn â Preface â 5
For this reason I enter into solitude â so as not to drink out of everyoneâs cisterns. Amid the many I live like the many and donât think as I; after some time I always feel then as if they wanted to ban me from myself and rob my soul â and I turn angry toward everyone and fear everyone. Then I need the desert to turn good again.
Friedrich Nietzsche â Dawn â 491
Women can form friendships with men very well; but to keep them, a little physical antipathy is very helpful.
Nietzsche â Human, All Too Human
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Anna Karenina â Leo Tolstoy
(The Anna Karenina principle)
An old legÂend has it that King MiÂdas hunted a long time in the woods for the wise Silenus, comÂpanÂion of DionyÂsus, withÂout beÂing able to catch him. When he had fiÂnally caught him the king asked him what he conÂsidÂered manâs greatÂest good. The daeÂmon reÂmained sullen and unÂcomÂmuÂnicaÂtive unÂtil fiÂnally, forced by the king, he broke into a shrill laugh and spoke: âEphemeral wretch, beÂgotÂten by acÂciÂdent and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be your greatÂest boon not to hear? What would be best for you is quite beÂyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothÂing. But the secÂond best is to die soon.â
The Wisdom of Silenus as told by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy
Inwardly he congratulated himself on having left behind him the irksome, irritating demands and menaces of mundane existenceâon 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 â 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 â 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 thingsâŚ
Henry David Thoreau â Walden
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth â look at the dying manâs 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 (âThe Philosophy of Giacomo Leopardiâ), 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 â 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 â Parerga and Paralipomena; also in âEssays and Aphorismsâ
A man is wise only on condition of living in a world full of fools.
Arthur Schopenhauer â 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 â 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 â The Sickness Unto Death
[âŚ] deep, deep, and forever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial
Hvad er ungdom? En drøm. Hvad er kÌrlighed? Drømmens indhold.
What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream.
Søren Kierkegaard â âEither/Or: A Fragment of Lifeâ. Quoted in the movie âAnother Roundâ (2020)
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence â whether much that is glorious â whether all that is profound â does not spring from disease of thought â from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora
We cannot give ourselves courage.
Don Abbondio in âThe Betrothedâ 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 oneâs own cost, and once it is learned, it cannot be put into practice; it being not in manâs 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 â Small Moral Works â 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 â 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 Motherâs 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 manâs 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 â that horrible passion, or rather non-passion, of man â truly and necessarily has its main seat in large cities, that is, in very extensive societies. Manâs 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. [âŚ]
Giacomo Leopardi to Carlo Leopardi â 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
Joyâs recollection is no longer joy, while sorrowâs memory is a sorrow still.
Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) â Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice (actâŻII, sceneâŻI)
The World as Will and Representation
[âŚ]But, besides all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I;âto 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[âŚ]
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, as found in âgeneric_gnostic_01_shardâ in the video game âCyberpunk 2077â (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, howÂever, 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 â 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 â Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
In these last days Iâve been much better (in a way however, that anyone whoâs fine, falling into this âbetterâ, would assume to be dead) [âŚ]
Giacomo Leopardi to Pietro Giordani, Recanati, August 8th 1817
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1603551[đĄ]
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 â Zibaldone
A leopard canât 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, âAm I happy?â and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, âNo, you are as poor and as miserable as before.â
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 â Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums Ăźber die franzĂśsische Revolution (âContribution to the Correction of the Publicâs Judgment on the French Revolutionâ)
[âŚ] and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receivâd and practisâd 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 â 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 repeatedâŚ
âOn Lifeâ by G. S. â âThe Public Advertiserâ of London
All of humanityâs problems stem from manâs 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.
RenĂŠ Descartes â Principles of Philosophy
All the worldâs a stage, And all the men and women merely Players;
William Shakespeare â As You Like It
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Lifeâs but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.
The Tragedy of Macbeth (Act V, Scene V) â William Shakespeare
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 â Oratio de hominis dignitate (âOration on the Dignity of Manâ)
There is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in wretchedness; [âŚ]
Dante Alighieri â Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto V
Life is, in man, the use of reason.
Dante Alighieri, Convivio (âThe Banquetâ), Book IV, Chapter VII; expanding from Aristotleâs âDe Animaâ (Book II)
But beware of the dire consequencesâŚ
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) â On the Misery of the Human Condition
It is possible to be a solitary in oneâs 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 â 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 follyâs ways. For the long years heap up a grievous load, Scant pleasures, heavier pains, Till not one joy remains For him who lingers on lifeâs 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 lifeâs 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 â 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 âPhaedoâ by âPlatoâ
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, âGod 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 placeâthey 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?â
Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes, 3:18 â 21
Omnia fui, nihil expedit.
Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus
Iâve 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.
âLife contains dukkha.â In Pali it means suffering, discomfort, dissatisfaction.
The First Noble Truth in Buddhism â though the concept also appears in much older texts from other cultures.
I know that peopleâs lives are not their own; it is not for them to direct their steps.
Bible â 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 (âÎÎĎον ĎÎľ κι὜ áźĎΚĎĎονâ â The mean is the best thing), Horace in the Satires (âEst modus in rebusâ â There is a measure in things), and Ovid in the Metamorphoses (âMedio tutissimus ibis â 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.)
Là the biòsas.
Epicurus
Stay aloof / live secluded.