Tag: collective illusion
The fundamental/primary collective illusion: the lie that life is a good thing, that it’s worth living; all the everyday abstractions superimposed on phenomenological reality; all coming from a lack of true metacognition in the majority of people.
The common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. (Erich Fromm)
To distract oneself from death (the opposite of memento mori) and the vanity of everything (Qoheleth).
Believing the immortality of the soul just because we dread the corpse. (Freud)
The collective disavowal of death, which establishes the human community as such. (Freud)
To tranquilize oneself with the trivial. (Kierkegaard)
To be total slaves to the Wille zum Leben. (Schopenhauer)
Unconsciousness and the pleasant naiveté, the “vital principle” of life. (Cioran and Pessoa)
The forgetfulness of our own selves that once came so easy. (Giacomo Leopardi)
The more or less self-conscious repression of the damning surplus of consciousness. (David Livingstone Smith)
Behaving as if living in the Garden of Eden before the apple (before knowledge).
The illogical Elpis.
The Grand March / Kitsch. (Kundera)
The conspiracy against the human race. (Ligotti)
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2025/06/the-catastrophe-of-birth.html[🡕] Continue reading
I don’t want to play the game of life
The most frustrating part is that there doesn’t really seem to be a real solution for this problem because every piece of advice people usually give is like, self-contained within the parameters of life if that makes sense, like every piece of advice people give still involves having to participate in life. Read the full page
And what do those philosophers who oppose our resenting life propose? The forging of new myths such as the übermensch or the deification of human history. However, changing gods won’t make a difference, just as returning to medieval or ancient times won’t make a difference. Eventually, these new myths will die, too, because some of us are intelligent enough to see through them. Read the full page
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 ’the norm’—and we literally cannot gain something good, or new, from interactions. We don’t need to interact with someone to validate an experience, or ’move on’ 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 it’s 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 they’re sad, they need to process it with others, and reference stability and coping mechanism off the ’other’… they cannot do this on their own.
That’s why virtually everyone that goes to therapy, goes to deal with their emotions, and the severe control emotions have over their actions.
That’s why a schizoid often gets nothing from most therapists, it’s not emotions for us, we’re 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 they’re reaching out to process and connect—they’re unfulfilled, or some door isn’t closed, and they feel an internal emotional sense that they ’must’—some how, reference off you to complete the task.
To you, that’s nonsense.
I mean, I’m saying it in an extreme way, and one can argue it’s not always like this—and it’s not.
But go read what ’mindfulness’ is—the thing where people struggle to do it even a few minutes a day, after months of trying, on purpose, and tell me—if, to you, that sounds like horse shit, because it’s describing a state you’re in 99 percent of the time as default.
That’s what I mean.
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/09/excess-lucidity.html[🡕] Continue reading
Considering that the rooster actually makes a desperate, hoarse sound like “H-H-HghdtrrrrOOOOOOOOOOUUuuh-OOOOOOOOUUUUUuuh”, the very invention of “cock-a-doodle-doo” instead of some “trou-trou” already says a lot about the mandatory optimism built into social structures.
Not to mention the sheep, which is basically a demon.
u/homebrandusername, r/Pessimism Continue reading
https://www.metaphysicalexile.com/2024/05/essay-about-giving-up.html[🡕] Continue reading
Treading water
u/Critical-Sense-1539, r/Pessimism
I get a similar sentiment whenever I come across popular “self-improvement” content. I’ve 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 don’t 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 “fulfilment” or the “good life”, a bit like the futility of treading water. You swing your arms and kick your legs to stay afloat, just so you’re able to breathe for a moment longer. However, no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to get out of the water. You’re always sinking so to stay above water, you have to expend effort over and over and over again until you’ve 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 won’t fix the pain associated with not achieving your desires but it might help alleviate feelings of self-hatred or guilt for having a “bad life”. After all, there’s no need to feel bad about yourself for losing a game that was impossible to win all along.
If one thinks about the (obviously made up) religious scenarios, or any other kind of hellish stories invented by humans, it’s obvious that most real lives don’t even come close to that. Continue reading
(EN Wikipedia) Depressive realism[🡕] Continue reading
Most people accept work and take it for granted, like the air we breath
Just try it. Say «All work sucks» to someone. See how people contort themselves philosophically to defend this “striving” belief system. Read the full page
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 “optimist” within the minimalist community.
There is no such thing as “give up”. 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 “win” at whatever they are doing.
Andrew McIntosh – On the Drive Towards Death and the Drive Away From Death (Ineffectual Whinging)
Just throwing a hodge podge of ideas I’ve read about and find interesting together in the hopes of coming up with a synthesis that doesn’t mean much in the end anyway. It’s not like I believe there are such things as “Death Drives” and “the Will” and all that, they’re more metaphorical for what is probably more mundane, neurobiological stuff going on in our stupid brains. Read the full page
[1:52] for me, I don’t know, looks like I’m the only one thinking this but the saturation and the numbers of things they drive me insane the fact that we’re 8 billion, that there’s so much music you wouldn’t get through it in 7 lifetimes, etc. I don’t know, I think about it every day yeah, that’s why I’m sick lol but I do think about it every day like, nihilism resides in the numbers, you don’t even need to do philosophy
We are daily slaves to the mitigation of suffering
What can even be done? Happy or sad, you still need to eat, you’re still aging, and you’re still going to die. Read the full page
r/Pessimism, u/Robotoro23
This is how people today justify suffering of people when industrial revolution began, “it was worth it because we now have a fridge, medicine and technology.
This is how now people are justifying suffering of people today, “it’s 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 don’t 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 ’problem’, everything being automated, upload our consciousness to machines etc…
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?
Why is living a constant torture?
Rant on Reddit, with good comments. Read the full page
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
[…] 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. […]
r/Pessimism, u/GloomInstance
There’s 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.
Andrew McIntosh – The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
[…] that whole insane “get up and go” mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake – what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? Read the full page
One day is the time it takes to get bored of your new shiny toy.
So you then go back to either your life as a slave or your basic organic distractions.
Also see Fichte
Sex, drugs, food.
Being able to get pleasure from anything else requires an incredible and amazing nervous system and a decent amount of self-illusion.
The loner is the one who withdraws his presence so as not to distress or bother others, to let them live their illusion, because truth brings nothing but pain. The lover who steps aside to let the other live, the Oblomov who doesn’t even try to make things work because he knows they can’t. How absurd it would be for time to fall in love with a girl, or for death to write her a love poem. Continue reading
On responsibility as the solution
It were the old family men of the pre-nihilistic-era, that believed in a future, and that told their children their morals, their hopes, their beliefs. Read the full page
Of all the foolish human chirping, the worst happens during meals, where the noise rises and nothingness becomes fertile. After hours of vile horror, everyone goes home knowing absolutely nothing more than before: on the contrary, with renewed idiocy.
It’s 2023, and newspapers are still talking about Berlusconi, and about the pope too. Okay, let’s not even get into politics, that’s a matter of mafia. But they’re still talking about the POPE (complete with vestments) of the CATHOLIC CHURCH. Continue reading
Brief and simple guidelines to navigate the mental health system
The human being is by nature incoherent and inconsistent. Read the full page
u/WanderingUrist
I’m 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 – 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 – 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 don’t have any idea it’s happening. They don’t even know. So much so that I’ve 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 – Schizoid Ramble: Emptiness and Advocacy
The concept of the “potential” is probably the most stupid lie that is told by people since ever.
If you are able to do something, your brain will lead you to do that, or at least something relating to that (not everyone can become an astronaut, for example, but you will work in related engineering stuff). If your brain won’t, then you won’t.
(expanding from Wittgenstein)
The digits of π are just a buffer overflow in the nonsense of language.
People have the -v option enabled by default.
And it’s insane for how long they need to explain something to someone else, and this someone else can even end up understanding nothing whatsoever. We’re talking 1 minute vs. 30 minutes.
Psychological mechanisms that feed the collective illusion
(EN Wikipedia) Just-world fallacy[🡕] Continue reading
An idea about why most people are so irrational
r/Pessimism, u/Wanderer974 Continue reading
Majority always wins.
Discerning gullible people, with judgment
In these last decades, conspiracy theories blew up. Stuff inside vaccines, UFOs, chemtrails, but-you-can’t-see-the-stars, it’s weird for a building to collapse just because a large airplane crashed into it at 750 km/h, and so on… Continue reading
How do you name a child? It’s impossible.
If I haven’t already chosen it from the beginning, I could spend days to set for a title for one of my ambient tracks; and I listen to the piece a thousand times to see what it evokes for me. At some point, I have to decide, and I manage to do it because in the end it’s not such an important thing.
But how do you name your children?
It’s actually simple: just live with those lightness and naivety which are exactly those which make you conceive them.
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
The sweet-spot of delusion. That’s where it’s at.
[…]
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 it’s 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.
Derek Muller went to visit Chernobyl… Read the full page
JAI @jaivcalla – I have to fucking say this
Completely different ontological plane of existence compared to People™.
Related: University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative – The Unfixed Brain[🡕]
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
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[🡕]
Why are normal people able to live (as explained by Lex Fridman)
Lex Fridman (a “normie”), explains in detail how he is able to live and not dwell on nihilism and depression, something that if you’re anything like me is fascinating and sometimes hard to fully grasp.
The bottom line is that it’s mainly how your brain is wired and its chemicals, which is consistent with the clear failure of psychotherapy in so many mental illness cases, and with the extensively demonstrated impossibility of changing the core of one’s personality – and, by contrast, with how drugs are a way more useful tool, albeit also limited and sadly inconsistent, chaotic, still not very issue-specific, and full of negative effects.
Madame – The illusion of love, and the worst fear: anhedonia
2021/03/24, Sopra le righe
Things change faster and faster and we keep keeping up because we are afraid to die.
Vsauce in the video “Illusions of Time”, inspired by “Social acceleration” by Hartmut Rosa
And all the parties they fade And yes, my looks, they’ll go away I’ll just be left here in America But she never had a home for me
London Grammar – America
Sometimes the thought is closer to the truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought. Continue reading
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 “Root”, via “Dreamer” / “Nightmare”, in “Remnant: From the Ashes”
Morally, having children is worse than murder: you create a life out of nothing and you sentence it to suffering for decades.
https://dnamistakes.webcomic.ws/comics/pl/1569766[🡕]
Life is unpredictable and control is just an illusion.
Hannah, 13 Reasons Why
When you’re suffering, that’s when you’re most real. Read the full page
Massimo Recalcati – Perversion
The Clinical Lesson of Jacques Lacan: Madness, Neurosis and Perversion (third session). IRPA, Associazione Accademia Pons, Jonas Onlus, Order of Psychologists of Lombardy, Enap Continue reading
Anonymous 02/29/16 (Mon) 08:44:00 No.5738, hikkichan.com (dead)
[…]Maybe life is better enjoyed when we forget we even have one? […]
– No one really likes what they do.
– Then why do we do it?
– Because we’re driven. Maybe a bit insecure. We get into things when we’re young and because we think they mean something.
– And then we find out that they don’t.
– Oh, Susan, enjoy the absurdity of our world (ed. contemporary art business). It’s a lot less painful. And believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world.
“Nocturnal Animals”, the gay husband
– There’s 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, God…
[…]
God actually created these rogue angels, knowing that they would defy Him, because what was the end result of this defiance?
The police superintendent: – Lucifer came to Earth in the guise of a serpent.
– Very good…
[…]
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
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 isn’t 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.
[…]
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 – and I close with this somewhat pedagogical note – what does it mean to “anticipate death”? 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 don’t rush like a desperate man, you don’t argue like a madman. You don’t kill yourself for the worries of the world, because you are mortal; you are mortal, and when you have to retire you don’t despair, you don’t die two years after: because death is still there waiting for you, it’s not as if life ends: you’re 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 didn’t anticipated death, because they didn’t assumed it as a condition… like a thickness of the soul, here – let’s use this word even if it refers to an entity that does not exist, the soul indeed.
But let’s 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 it’s all over: no, no, no, stop. If you internalize death in advance then you relativize all things, and all things don’t 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)
Let them grow their beards and talk careers
Molly Nilsson – Mountain Time
Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it.
Michel Houellebecq – Submission
I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.
Michel Houellebecq – Submission
I envy people who commit suicide
r/offmychest, u/SoulOfTheInternet Continue reading
About the movie “Melancholia” – Florin Flueras
All other sorrow in comparison with this is a travesty of the real thing. For he experiences true sorrow, who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is. Read the full page
Of course everyone knows, on an intellectual level, that they won’t live forever. But that doesn’t mean that they really acknowledge it. Read the full page
It’s not that old people are wise: they just have a very low dose of sexuality and aggressiveness – that’s it. And at this level they are also calm, unless they have a bad temper.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
The Crazy Woman Next Door – Conversation with Alda Merini
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives […], is the part that flies over matter and is the one that’s the most attentive and the most painful: namely, seeing the deterioration of the body, this soul distress itself, it… above all, it loses its way. Continue reading
Suffering is not just an intellectual game
https://reducing-suffering.org/the-horror-of-suffering/#Suffering_is_not_just_an_intellectual_game[🡕] Continue reading
This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s 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 don’t deal with what lies beyond. Therefore, let this novel begin. After all, it’s just a trick. Yes, it’s just a trick.
Jep, “The Great Beauty”, ending
2000 – Dialogue with The Dreamer
We have been in a mental crisis since 2000. Read the full page
It should always be evening.
That’s the only way.
I’m noticing that I have a skull inside my face. Read the full page
You’d be surprised by how many people aspire to be completely normal. We’re a race apart. You have to fight to the teeth for not end up being one of them. Read the full page
There are many ways of dying; the worst of them is to continue living.
This must be the place
– You’re young and still think there’s something out there, floating… that resembles dreams. And there isn’t.
[…]
Let’s not discuss tastes. How could we ever understand each other? It’s like a 17th century knight meeting a rock singer. Young people like impossible things. And older people, the simplest. It’s like flying: when you’re young, you think you can fly. That your car just flies away. Flies away, I don’t 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.
[…]
– Real politicians make me sick. They deceive people.
– You think people want to know the truth. They’d rather be deceived.
– You can’t be happy if you don’t lie to yourself?
The park is now empty and bare[🡕], with an abandoned chain about it. The jungle gym, the slide and swing have rusted together. They’re all so terribly alone now. Where did all the children go? Didn’t they know that the park needed them?
A child’s intelligent heart can fathom the depth of many dark places. But can it fathom the delicate moment of its own detachment?
Detachment
This is a strange, rather perverse, story, just to put it in very simple terms. It’s a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.
Tim Jackson’s 2010 TED talk
We have created so much material, so many movies, so many books. We have covered the Earth with works of hope, sadness, love. Today they mostly make garbage; the sirs of the past wrote about man’s pain; now men enjoys themselves in the middle of the manure and those texts are seen more like work rather than pleasure. Continue reading
– 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 – a lovely name – and they’re the ones who don’t believe that you may even need happiness in the present life. So, everyone else seems to be left miserable, and I’m 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.
– 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 hasn’t gotten worse with age or anything: I do feel that it’s 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 I’m 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 O’Neill… One must have one’s delusions to live: if you look at life too honestly and clearly, life does become unbearable because it’s 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 “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yVPS8XBoBE[🡕]
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 – 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 one’s own is the most sacred characteristic of man.
The Harsh Noise Wall[🡕] 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.
“A View From Nihil” in “Triumph of the Broken Will”
People think that life is something else, but that’s not true, life is not your coin collection, it only is by illusion, once you have a wife by your side. What about after? Afterwards, everything around you is as if it didn’t exist and never existed, it has less value than a turd. Continue reading
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race – A Contrivance of Horror – Thomas Ligotti
The horror handed down to us will be handed down to others like a scandalous heirloom. Being alive: decades of waking up on time, then trudging through another round of moods, sensations, thoughts, cravings—the complete gamut of agitations—and finally flopping into bed to sweat in the pitch of dead sleep or simmer in the phantasmagorias that molest our dreaming minds. Read the full page
We humans actually like to die. Because it is the only thing that gives meaning to our life, and that puts an end to that painful feeling of perceiving our existence (as well as – but that’s obvious – to physical and psychological suffering). But at the same time, death reminds us of emptiness and nonsense. And so, this strange paradox is created, and between the two paths, most choose to distract themselves.
I noticed that it is not possible to go back. I could not step down from the throne nor undo what hitherto slipped before my eyes and was now as written in stone. I attached the utmost importance to the truth, and unconsciously found myself writing a cruel pact with it. The sensations tasted different. The features of reality were clear and cold. Corroded by a gray light, the walls showed the wrinkles of time. It is not raining. But the sun still hides behind the bare buildings. That sun that hides its true essence with all that light. So much light for so much darkness. Continue reading
The famous geologist said, on television, that our heads are too big, and it is difficult for us to get out of the pussy; the ribcage protects only a few organs; the veins in the legs struggle to hold up the whole body; the back, for it to keep the erect position, it needs to arch, and therefore back pain, etc.; vision also has several problems, etc. In short, we are shit. We are not as wonderful of a machine as they say, we have a thousand flaws. And therefore we are not the result of a divine plan, blah blah. Obvious stuff, it was a speech against religions, but I was more interested in the fact that evolution is still ongoing and we are currently far from perfect; his words: «we adapted as best as we could». Here you are. Difficult evolutionary natural adaptation. Interesting parallelism with social adaptation, which is ultimately strongly linked to it. And someone makes fun making memes that show how, in a certain sense, we are now living an involution. Very in tune with the cyberpunk world, which sees the end of man coinciding with the maximum technological development. Continue reading
There’s a thirst for ignorance, because for millennia there has been a thirst for knowledge. Humanity has got to know so much, too much. And as it now notices that it’s worse off than before, the desire has reversed itself, and so there is a thirst for ignorance. But this has not led to a productive step backwards, because by now the damage has already been done and it has already changed the game: it has led to a heavy, aggressive and self-destructive ignorance, not the simple smug knowledge of the old years.
Nature is Satan’s church.
Antichrist (2009), Lars von Trier
Once that which is in fact an illusion has fallen, you will suddenly find yourself thrown into reality. Read the full page
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
David Eagleman – “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives”
Everyone was staying confined to those narrow mental spaces. And I, like them; I only knew that small world. And everything was goddamn gorgeous. There was passion, challenge, dialogues, workaholism, and satisfaction. Continue reading
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Obligation of worn-out dialogue to the bitter end It’s invoked by those who retreat, dodged by those who advance Everyone is self-sufficient, yet the numbers don’t add up
PGR – Cronache di guerra II (“War Chronicles II”)
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, don’t 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 you’ll realize it’s 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 it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.
The Hurt Locker – James speaking to his son
– That was amazing. I wish I could play.
– Take lessons. You’d enjoy playing. If you knew more, you wouldn’t have such a high opinion of my playing.
Elegy
(At the zoo.)
– What do you see?
– Animals.
– 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
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
Big city life Here my heart have no base And right now Babylon de ’pon me case
People in a show, All lined in a row. We just push on by, It’s funny, How hard we try.
[…]
Soon our work is done, All of us, one by one. Still, we live our lives, As if all this stuff survives.
[…]
I find myself in a big city prison Arisen from the vision of mankind
Designed, to keep me discreetly Neatly in the corner
[…]
Mattafix – Big City Life
Civilization has no appeal to me. The Eastern Peoples seem to live their lives more sensibly. Because they don’t have such distant goals as us, the white brotherhood. The East is… «If you are moving, then you are on the right path.» While for us, the path doesn’t matter – only reaching the goal. I want to go to the East, because there I will feel well. I’ll be able to enter the Present time.
The point is – 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 aren’t a specific substance: they’re anything that you’re addicted to. When you lose what you’ve been addicted to, you have to accept something different. I’ve accepted that all these “gods” we have, they’re all teachers. There is one god – they all serve him! Like in Hinduism: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva – 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, to…
WIth opiates you have the sense that you are wasting your life. Sleeping. Then you say to yourself: «I’m sleeping!» So you get up, and try to do other things, other drugs; I do all sort of drugs, but I remain active. That’s why I won’t quit until I find a steady girlfriend: otherwise I’ll die of boredom. But I don’t 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 “Narcissi”, blooming here in this canal. Everything is always uncertain, you are always alone, so you say to yourself: «What’s the point?!» If you had a wife, kids, TV, a newspaper… It’s kind of idyllic. That’s why there are movies to experience another life. More or less, that’s why there is art.
Kamen Petrov in “Invisible”
Her [ed. his mother’s] life was a failure, her marriage was a failure… And I’m a part of that failure. That’s probably how she sees it. And she wants to start over, but she doesn’t 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
Arisen in vain to a life, Bleeding inner to suffer with time. Endlessly lost and still searching For something; someday…
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.
[…]
Serve the frail mind, Escape through the lifetime To glance for your dismal youth.
Get closer, Closer to your own faith.
Shape of Despair – Still-Motion
In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.
The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear – Part 1. Baby It’s Cold Outside
People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes. They think they do but they don’t. If you’re the depressed type now, that’s the way you’ll always be. If you’re the mindless happy type now, that’s the way you’ll 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, you’ll always be the same.
Palindromes; also quoted in Morgondagen by Apati
Umberto Galimberti – The success of philosophy
But for those who, adapted to the world, and with a moderate self-awareness still do not find a meaning of their existence, and therefore come into contact not with this or that pain, but with the essence of pain, for those there is no remedy in the pharmacy and perhaps not even in psychotherapy. Read the full page
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, “About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ch.7, 1921).
Jeremy Griffith – A Species In Denial (introduction)
Chance doesn’t 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[🡕] 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 life’s objective is to make it meaningful Only searching for this That which doesn’t exist Although our ability to relativize remains unclear
I’m not afraid to die I’m afraid to be alive without being aware of it
I’m so afraid to, I couldn’t stand to Waste all my energy on things that do not matter anymore
Our future has already been written by us alone But we don’t 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 – Sensorium; lyrics by Mark Jansen
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – John Gray
r/Pessimism, u/historyismyteacher Continue reading
Carmelo Bene – Four Moments on the Whole Nothing – 4°: Art
(Miserable) artists and relative (miserable) consumers. Read the full page
Carmelo Bene – Four Moments on the Whole Nothing – 3°: Eros
Poor, poor… Poor lovers! Read the full page
“What surprises you most about mankind?”
God answered:
“That they get bored of being children, are in a rush to grow up, and then long to be children again. That they lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health. That by thinking anxiously about the future, they forget the present, such that they live neither for the present nor the future. That they live as if they will never die, and they die as if they had never lived.”
Often misattributed to the Dalai Lama; from “An Interview with God” by James J. Lachard (pen name of James J. Brown), early 2000s – wording may not match the original exactly.
We pass the time of day to forget how time passes.
Amélie – Hipolito (the writer)
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 l’homme marchait sur la lune?
[…]
You stand before the final dimension, and I am the darkness of eternity…
[…] 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 – the crystal.
[…]
…Now, the theory is undeniable. Kuja’s action proves it. All things live to perish. At last, life has uncovered this truth. Now, it is time to end this world.
[…]
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.
[…]
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, come…
Necron, Final Fantasy IX
Your fears of death covered up by the words “Suicide is weak”
Abyssic Hate
You and me, baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
Bloodhound Gang – The Bad Touch
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re 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. You’re a plague and we are the cure.
Agent Smith in “The Matrix”
You know, I know this steak doesn’t 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 “The Matrix”
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 “The Matrix”
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You’ve never used them before.
The Matrix
I am Ultimecia. Time shall compress, all existence denied…
Reflect on your childhood: your sensation, your words, your emotions…
Time… It will not wait.
No matter how hard you hold on. It escapes you.
And… [And you’re going to die. / And everything will be destroyed.]
Ultimecia (Artemisia), Final Fantasy VIII
Right and wrong are not what separate us and our enemies. It’s our different standpoints, our perspectives that separate us. Both sides blame one another. There’s no good or bad side. Just two sides holding different views.
Squall Leonhart in Final Fantasy VIII
– 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, isn’t 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:
– I can read people’s minds. In my lifetime I have read the pasts, presents, and futures of thousands upon thousands of men and women.
[…]
And each mind that I peered into was stuffed with the same single object of obsession. That selfish and atavistic desire to pass on one’s seed… it was enough to make me sick. Every living thing on this planet exists to mindlessly pass on their DNA. We’re designed that way. And that’s why there is war.
But you… you are different… You’re the same as us. We have no past, no future. We live in the moment. That’s our only purpose.
Humans weren’t designed to bring each other happiness. From the moment we’re thrown into this world, we’re fated to bring each other nothing but pain and misery.
Psycho Mantis’ dying words in “Metal Gear Solid” (PSX)
– But dad, you’re talking, like, in 25 years. Sorry, but I’d rather be happy now than in 25 years.
– Sure, you’re right. Perhaps it’s not much of a comfort at the moment. But anyway…
– ’Cause in 25 years… That’s, like, 25 years. It doesn’t exist.
Show Me Love / Fucking Åmål
More than a source of mental pain, today depression is a way of life. Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
The sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era, the broken dream of the belle époque. As with the fall of the Babylonian empire, the sinking of the Titanic represented the symbol of the crumbling of proud empires, with a similar mix of rich, bourgeois and poor all destined together for the abyss. It was the end of a legend that married technology to wealth, materialism to romance, illusion to fantasy.
Massimo Polidoro, The Curse of Titanic
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Flaming, astonished souls When torn is the veil of blindness
[…]
Beauty appears, never intrusive nor lazy Languid when it’s time, strong, light, and austere The air serene, brimming with strength
C.S.I. – Brace (Ember)
Athletes
[…]
But it’s 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 one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s 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 child’s 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, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.
David Foster Wallace, “The String Theory” (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 you’ve 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 […]
✻
[…] 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
You know how I know it’s the end of the world? Because everything’s been done, every kind of music’s been tried, every government’s been tried, every fuckin’ hairstyle. How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake?
Max Peltier in “Strange Days”
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.
As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.
Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.
The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.
Carmelo Bene, Autografia di un ritratto (“Autograph of a Portrait”)
As If The World Were Ending: The Meaning of the Schizophrenic Experience – Eugenio Borgna
“Confess! Confess! they shouted at me, just as they once did with sorcerers and heretics, and in the end, I decided to let myself be classified within an illness defined by doctors and indiscriminately labeled in medical dictionaries as either theomania or demonomania. By relying on the inherent meanings of these two definitions, science grants itself the right to make disappear or silence all the prophets and seers foretold in the Apocalypse; and I took solace in being one of them.” Read the full page
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Any so-called “know-it-all” expertise is bullshit, and any problem is a false problem. For once, on this show, we’re really talking about bullshit, finally! It’s about time!, to recognize that we’re always talking bullshit. Tonight we’re saying it’s not just tonight that it’s bullshit, but that we’re always just talking words – that is, bullshit.
Carmelo Bene at the Maurizio Costanzo Show (“Uno contro tutti” 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? …Knowing that none of it will have meant anything once they do?
[…]
Bleh! You people make me sick! You sound like lines from a self-help book! If that’s how it’s going to be… I’ll 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 I’m young I’m a young girl Well, I mean… I’m a young woman And then, I guess, I’ll 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 I’ll get a little older, God willing Guess I’ll just get A wee bit older And then I’ll be, yes That’s right: An older woman And as the years roll on and on and on I’ll keep on getting older, God willing
And then, well… Well, I guess Nothin’ for it I’m gonna be If God wills it Yes, that’s right: An old woman An old, old woman
And as the years roll on and on and on I’ll keep on getting older, God willing
But you’ll still say I’m beautiful I’ll still be beautiful inside And lovely to you, huh, baby? Lovely to you, huh, baby?
And I’ll say to them young’uns: «Hey, kids! Kids! Gather round, Gather round me, now.»
«When your grandfather and I were young…»
And as the years roll on and on and on I’ll keep on getting older, God willing
«Oh, mother, mother,» «Hear me, father,» «Catch me when I fall!» And as the years roll on and on and on I’ll keep on getting older, God willing…
Rebecca Pidgeon – Grandmother
Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living in itself; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.
Michel Houellebecq – Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte)
As the taxi took me through the city to the station, I felt as though I’d been dropped onto another planet, a cruel and hostile place. Inclined by character to silence and reflection, I’d always been repulsed by noise and uproar, by any manifestation of the excessive merriment that so often borders on violence. I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it.
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it. Read the full page
Under neon loneliness everlasting nothingness
Manic Street Preachers – Motorcycle Emptiness
Mitch: You ever been in love?
Curly: Once. I was driving a herd across the panhandle. Texas. I don’t 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 settin’ 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 wasn’t gonna get any better than that.
Mitch: Yeah, but you could have been, you know… with her.
Curly: I’ve been with lots of women…
Mitch: Yeah, but you know, she could have been the love of your life.
Curly: She is.
[…]
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 don’t mean shit.
Mitch: That’s great, but… what’s the “one thing?”
Curly: *smiles and points his finger at Mitch* That’s 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.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin – Doin’ It Again
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
If you don’t 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. But theatre is essentially the non-place.
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
I’m not interested in solving the ills of society. I don’t want to save the world. I don’t even want to save me… I think most talk is so boring; I mean: save this, do that, do this… I think we’re all so boring saying everything we don’t even wanna save ourselves, we’re so boring talking about it. There’s nothing left to save, we’re so fucking boring. Let it die, I say. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.
Charles Bukowski – Let There Be A New Beginning
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
Barfly
Henry: Hey, you don’t believe in that crap, do you?
Wanda: Sure. The more crap you believe in, the more better off you are.
Barfly
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway – The Garden of Eden
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) – Pasquale Panella for Lucio Battisti
Bill Hicks
The Annunciation – András Jeles
We exist, and yet we do not exist. Read the full page
– What is the Nothing?
– It’s the emptiness that’s left. It’s like a despair, destroying this world, and I have been trying to help it.
The NeverEnding Story
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. Read the full page
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 I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take When people run in circles it’s 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 what’s 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 I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take When people run in circles it’s a very very mad world
[…]
Tears For Fears – Mad World
Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.
This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.
But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
God: he can’t 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 “children”.
I took my bottle and went to my bedroom. I undressed down to my shorts and went to bed. Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
I took my choice. I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something.
Charles Bukowski – Women
Erich Fromm – Normal people are the sickest
I think it’s a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. Read the full page
How in the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
Charles Bukowski – Factotum
– 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 couldn’t see it very clearly, but at the very top was Death.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
The unforgettable days in a man’s life number only five or six. The rest just fill up space.
Ennio Flaiano, Autobiografia del Blu di Prussia (“Autobiography of Prussian Blue”)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Because nothing challenges power as much as Resignation, which is, in fact, the rejection of power in any form (that is, it reveals power for what it really is: an illusion).
P.P. Pasolini, in “Tempo Illustrato”
When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
In paradise, objects and beings, assaulted by light from all sides, cast no shadow. Which is to say that they lack reality, like anything that is unbroached by darkness and deserted by death.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
“For [Elohim] doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened…”
No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present. By freeing himself from succession, he has devoured the possible and rendered the future superfluous. “I cannot meet you in your future,” he says to the others. “We do not have a single moment in common.” Because for him the whole of the future is already here.
When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I’ve got several degrees. Call me Mr.
Charles Bukowski – South of No North
It seemed a man only had two choices – get in on the hustle or be a bum.
Charles Bukowski – South of No North
…to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
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
Our Lady of the Turks – Carmelo Bene
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary. Read the full page
We should give the sense of death back to people.
Partner – P.P. Pasolini
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
If you spend time with the most erudite ones, it doesn’t mean that you get close to the absolute.
Carmelo Bene – 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 – Our Lady of the Turks
Were (say) Frankl to attempt to cure (say) Zapffe from his “existential frustration,” “ontological despair” or “metaphysic-melancholic clairvoyance,” the chances are that Zapffe (rather than “cured”) would be baffled by Frankl’s sophomoric philosophizing. “You may be psychologically healthier than I,” Zapffe would gladly admit, “but I must insist that I am a better philosopher. A lifelong search for a meaning of life in general, and of my life in particular, has led me – reluctantly, but with cataclysmic consistency and sleepwalker’s certainty – to realize that it’s all fantasy and delusions, divinely subsidized to put us at peace with our ’situation.’ You are certainly right that psycho-pathological explanations of my biosophical pessimism would be totally irrelevant; but I also fail to see what you can possibly accomplish with your naïve, maladroit metaphysics, behind which – if you will permit me to speak your language for once – I see but the profoundest, most fundamental trauma, and that great universal repression which prevents all fatal insight into man and his ’cosmic conditions,’ the mysterious, grotesquely absurd origin and genesis of body and mind, their inalienable interests, and their final and complete obliteration, the return of the synthesis to the absolute zero.” The biosophist is fully aware of the many marvellous metaphysics offering “peace in heart,” “reconciliation with the world” and “atonement with the almighty,” or the like, to anyone who is willing to join this or that suificating sect, and replace intellectually honest experience with fictitious world views. The spiritual vacuum is often so painful that if the fiction is sufficiently permanent, it does not seem to matter if it should turn out not to be so terribly pleasant.
Happiness Is for the Pigs: Philosophy versus Psychotherapy – Herman Tønnessen
Happiness is for the pigs.
Title of the book by Herman Tønnessen
– See how the smoke trembles in the roof hole? As if whimpering and afraid. Yet it’s only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesn’t 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 don’t know.
The Virgin Spring / Jungfrukällan
Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
Unknown source, generally misattributed to Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Time Stood Still – Ermanno Olmi
People’s feelings have changed. Read the full page
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited
Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
Allen Saunders, Reader’s Digest magazine
When the problem of happiness supplants that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its proper domain to engage in a suspect activity: it concerns itself with man… Questions it would once have scorned asking now attract its attention, and it attempts to answer them in all seriousness. “How is suffering to be avoided?” is the first to entice it. In a phase of lassitude, increasingly alien to impersonal concerns, to the thirst for knowledge, it abandons speculation and to the truths that disturb prefers those that console.
Emil Cioran – The Temptation to Exist
The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Various attributions
Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. Read the full page
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
1984 – George Orwell
Do normies suffer?
In other words, you might say that I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick. My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I. I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.
I simply don’t understand. I have not the remotest clue what the nature or extent of my neighbor’s woes can be. Practical troubles, griefs that can be assuaged if only there is enough to eat—these may be the most intense of all burning hells, horrible enough to blast to smithereens my ten misfortunes, but that is precisely what I don’t understand: if my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine? Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves? If that is the case, their sufferings should be easy to bear: they are the common lot of human beings and perhaps the best one can hope for. I don’t know… If you’ve slept soundly at night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose. What kind of dreams do they have? What do they think about when they walk along the street? Money? Hardly—it couldn’t only be that. I seem to have heard the theory advanced that human beings live in order to eat, but I’ve never heard anyone say that they lived in order to make money. No. And yet, in some instances… No, I don’t even know that… The more I think of it, the less I understand. All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?—I don’t know.
No Longer Human / A Shameful Life – Osamu Dazai
All human activities are equivalent and all are on the principle doomed to failure. […] Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
(In the dedication to Leone Werth)
All grown-ups were once children (but only few of them remember it).
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill, probably about Stanley Baldwin; Reader’s Digest magazine
You really have to see men from above. I put out the light and went to the window: they never suspected for a moment you could watch them from up there. They’re careful of their fronts, sometimes their backs, but their whole effect is calculated for spectators about five feet eight. Who ever thought about the shape of a derby hat seen from the seventh floor? They neglect protecting their heads and shoulders with bright colors and garish clothes, they don’t know how to fight this great enemy of Humanity, the downward perspective.
Erostratus – Jean-Paul Sartre
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. Read the full page
The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.
Sigmund Freud, letter to Marie Bonaparte
The great problem is how to live without being conscious of the fact that we have got to live; how to divert ourselves without thinking of why we should seek diversion; not only to escape the spectre of Ennui, but how to act as though we did not know of its existence. We are all playing near a great fearful Presence, and our object should be to rivet our gaze so completely on our work and busy ourselves so closely with our toys that we shall not have time to look up and see the Thing. The Thing—stark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thing—is always right there over our shoulder. The most active beings are those who are trying, unconsciously, the hardest to dodge Its gaze. Man has no mission in life except to escape the “Black Man who will come and get you,” as we tell the children.
Benjamin De Casseres – Saint Tantalus, chapter “Disenchantment: Behind the arras”
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
Emil Cioran – On the Heights of Despair
The Last Messiah – Peter Wessel Zapffe
«Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.» Read the full page
Natural law does not entitle us to happiness, but rather it prescribes wretchedness and sorrow. When something edible is left exposed, from all directions parasites come running, and if there are no parasites, they are quickly generated. Soon the prey is barely sufficient, and immediately afterwards it no longer suffices at all, for nature doesn’t do sums, she experiments. When food no longer suffices, then consumers must diminish through death preceded by pain; thus equilibrium, for a moment, is reestablished.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn’t tolerate therapies.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
Short Stories for a Year – The Wheelbarrow – Luigi Pirandello
When there’s someone around, I never look at her, but I feel that she’s looking at me, she’s looking at me without taking her eyes off me for a moment. I’d like to make her understand in private that it’s nothing, that she should relax, that I couldn’t allow myself to perform this brief act in front of others, that for her it’s of no importance, but for me it’s everything. I perform it every day at the right moment in utmost secrecy and with frightful joy because, trembling, I experience the delight of a divine, conscious madness that for an instant frees me and allows me to get even with everything. Read the full page
Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer – Studies on Hysteria
[…] that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it; […]
George Bernard Shaw
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
Mark Twain
Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy—ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!
Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.[🡕]
Friedrich Nietzsche – The Joyous Science
Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps? – To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is “in a hurry.” Philology is, namely, that venerable art that requires of its admirers one thing above all else: to go aside, to take time, to become still, become slow – as a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word, which has nothing but fine, cautious work to take care of and which achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for exactly this reason, philology is today more necessary than ever, by exactly this means, philology attracts and enchants us most powerfully in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, […]
Nietzsche – Dawn – Preface – 5
There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, ’til at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: “Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is – to die soon.”
Friedrich Nietzsche – The Birth of Tragedy
Inwardly he congratulated himself on having left behind him the irksome, irritating demands and menaces of mundane existence—on having placed a great distance between himself and the horizon where there may be seen flashing the lightning-bolts of keen pleasure, and whence come the thunder-peals of sudden affliction, and where flicker the false hopes and the splendid visions of average happiness, and where independence of thought gradually engulfs and devours a man, and where passion slays him outright, and where the intellect fails or triumphs, and where humanity engages in constant warfare, and leaves the field of battle in a state of exhaustion and of ever-unsatisfied, ever-insatiable desire.
Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things…
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth – look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
Søren Kierkegaard, journals
A man is wise only on condition of living in a world full of fools.
Arthur Schopenhauer – The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims
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).
It is no longer possible to deceive ourselves or dissemble the truth. Philosophy has made us understand so much that the forgetfulness of our own selves, that once came so easy, is now impossible.
Giacomo Leopardi – Small Moral Works, Fragment on Suicide
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
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
[The human life] swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Full excerpt:
We have already seen in nature-without-knowledge her inner being as a constant striving without aim and without rest, and this stands out much more distinctly when we consider the animal or man. Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst. The basis of all willing, however, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents. This has been expressed very quaintly by saying that, after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom.
There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy… So long as we persist in this inborn error, and indeed even become confirmed in it through optimistic dogmas, the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence… hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.
Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Imagination, as I have said, is the primary source of human happiness. The more it reigns in a person, the happier that person will be. We see this in children. But it cannot reign without ignorance, at least a certain ignorance, like that of the ancients. The knowledge of truth, that is, of the limits and definitions of things, constrains imagination.
Giacomo Leopardi – Zibaldone
Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, “Am I happy?” and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, “No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.”
Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first… Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there.
In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte – Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (“Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgment on the French Revolution”)
[…] and you will observe with Concern how long a useful Truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally receiv’d and practis’d on.
Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Benjamin Vaughan
O Julie, what a fatal present from heaven is a sensible soul! He who has received it must expect to know nothing but pain and suffering in this world. Lowly plaything of the air and seasons, his destiny will be regulated by sun or fog, fair or overcast weather, and he will be satisfied or sad at the whim of the winds. Victim of prejudice, he will find in absurd maxims an invincible obstacle to the just wishes of his heart. Men will punish him for having upright sentiments on every subject, and for judging by what is genuine rather than by what is conventional. Alone he would suffice to his own misery, by giving himself over indiscreetly to the divine attractions of honesty and beauty, whereas the weighty chains of necessity attach him to ignominy. He will seek supreme felicity without remembering that he is a man: his heart and his reason will be endlessly at war, and unbounded desires will set in store for him eternal deprivation.
Julie or the New Heloise – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely Players;
William Shakespeare – As You Like It
Out of the mouths of babes and drunkards comes the truth.
English saying
CHORUS (Str.) Who craves excess of days, Scorning the common span Of life, I judge that man A giddy wight who walks in folly’s ways. For the long years heap up a grievous load, Scant pleasures, heavier pains, Till not one joy remains For him who lingers on life’s weary road And come it slow or fast, One doom of fate Doth all await, For dance and marriage bell, The dirge and funeral knell. Death the deliverer freeth all at last. (Ant.) Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay To trace the backward way. For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain for ever pain; And none escapes life’s coils. Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life. Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage Of unregarded age, Joyless, companionless and slow, Of woes the crowning woe.
Sophocles – Oedipus at Colonus (transl. by F. Storr)
Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. (Every thing is ephemeral, everything is transient.)
Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes
Omnia fui, nihil expedit.
Roman emperor Lucius Septimius Severus
I’ve been all things, but all was worthless.
Nihil sub sole novum.
Qohelet, 1,9-10
Nothing new under the sun. (Everything has already been said or done before.)
Ignorance is bliss.