Tag: society/politics (171 entries)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Welcome to right wing America, where if you want to end a young life, you have to shoot them.

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

[young people] went out there to stop discrimination – not all discrimination, just some of it… Which is a weird form of discrimination, but…

– You’re a nymphomaniac. […] When I was young, I was like you. […] I’d just think about sex, all the time.

– Yes? And you fucked all the girls?

– I tried.

– But?

– I didn’t fuck all of them because it’s difficult for a man. But for the woman it’s more easy (sic): you can fuck everyone. Right?

– Yes. –, and she laughs.

whatever question you’re asking yourself, the answer is that you’re not in control, so ride the wave but be ready to swim

– What’s so bad about being a pig?

– It’s undignified.

– Undignified?

– Walking about with your nose the same height as your asshole.

– Snout.

– What’s that?

– Pigs have snouts, not noses. So it would be your snout the same height as your asshole.

– Nose, snout… You’re still trotting about gazing up everybody else’s assholes all day long. What kind of society is that?

– An equal one?

Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.

– 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.

Money doesn’t buy you happiness, it just buys you a lot of therapy to talk about why you’re not happy.

What we should do is take all the mentally defective people in this country and give them government jobs, and just sit back and watch things improve.

– 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?

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

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.

– 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.

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

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

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

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

No matter what one does, there is never enough time.

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.

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

There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life – I repeat, everything – is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.

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

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

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

Variations:

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

The law against murder is the number one thing preventing murder.

[…]

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…

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.

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.

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.

– 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.

– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?

– What?

– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?

– You wouldn’t be you, if you couldn’t play.

– No, I want to know.

– Our bodies sway to music. «Oh, brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?»

– But don’t you wish, sometimes, that you couldn’t play, that you could just be ordinary?

– Like what? Live in the country? Making bread? Feeding chickens? Playing once a year with a bunch of amateurs?

– How dare you insult my sister like that…

– I wasn’t insulting her.

– Well, at least she chose her life. Not like you and me. We’re just trained freaks.

– 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.

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.

[…]

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.

Shut me in, Levante. Shut me in.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

God: he can’t find us any better than Santa Claus.

Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.

[…]

The horror… The horror…

We are that breed that’s never quite alright,
jump ditches by day, skip dinner by night.
I’ll shout it loud till I’m hoarse and dry:
we barely get laid even though we try.
We’re the ones who pack the cinema tight,
to see naked girls, jerkin’ off all night.

Yet nature still whispers, through valley and hill,
that caterpillars can fly, if they’ve got the will.
But we’re the breed that defies all the rules:
born as worms… still worms we stay, like fools.
We’ve been fucked by misery, went in raw, no glove:
didn’t pull out clean, now we’re stuck with bad love.

– Well, you know, I’ve been observing you here now for the last four weeks, and I don’t see any evidence of mental illness at all. And I think that you’ve been trying to put us on, all this time.

– You know, what do you want me to do? *mimics crazy gestures* You know what I mean, is that it? Is that crazy enough for you? Want me to take a shit on the floor? Tsk! Christ…

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

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

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?

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).

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

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

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

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

– Why is that smoke yellow?

– Because it’s poison.

– But then, if a little bird flies through it, it dies.

– Well, by now the little birds know, and they don’t fly through it anymore.

– I haven’t recovered. I never will. Never…

[…]

– Don’t say that. Calm down. What are you afraid of?

– The streets, the factories, the colors, the people… everything!

[…]

– There’s something terrible about reality and I don’t know what it is. No one will tell me. Even you don’t help me, Corrado.

We asked the woman if there was one thing she wanted more than anything else in life. She looked at us, puzzled. Then, in a half voice, she said: “To sleep. Three days in a row.” “Nothing else?” we asked. She nodded. “To die,” she replied; and she wasn’t joking.

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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, […]

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

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

Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.

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…

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

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

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

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.

[…] 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.

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.

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