"I have a sense that, for creatures like me, there are no propitious material circumstances, no situations that will turn out well. This sense is already enough to make me distance myself from life; indeed, it only makes me distance myself still more. The list of achievements which, for ordinary men, makes success inevitable, has, when applied to me, a quite different, unexpected and adverse result. I sometimes have the painful impression that I am the victim of some divine enmity. It seems to me that the only explanation for the series of disasters that defines my life is that someone is consciously manipulating things in order to turn any such achievements into something malevolent. The result of all this is that I never try too hard. Fortune, if it so wishes, may come and find me. I know all too well that my greatest efforts will never meet with the success others enjoy. That is why I abandon myself to Fortune and expect nothing from her. Why would I? My stoicism is an organic necessity. I need to armor myself against life. Since all stoicism is really just a harsher form of epicureanism, I want as far as possible to enjoy my misfortune. I’m not sure to what extent I achieve this. I’m not sure to what extent I achieve anything. I don’t know to what extent one can achieve anything ... Whereas one person triumphs, not by virtue of his own efforts, but because his triumph is inevitable, I never triumph and never would, however inevitable or however much effort I made. I was perhaps born, spiritually speaking, on a very short winter’s day. Night descended early on my existence. The only way I can live my life is in frustration and solitude. Deep down, none of this is very stoical at all. My suffering is only noble when I put it into words. Otherwise, I whine and whimper like a sick child. I fret and worry like a housewife. My life is entirely futile and entirely sad."
Philosophical pessimism is the view that life and existence are of negative value. It is often expressed as the claim that life is not worth living and that non-existence would, at least in many cases, be preferable to coming into or remaining in existence. Other formulations focus on claims that suffering and other harms have more impact or severity than pleasure and other goods; that the amount
Philosophical pessimism is the view that life and existence are of negative value. It is often expressed as the claim that life is not worth living and that non-existence would, at least in many cases, be preferable to coming into or remaining in existence. Other formulations focus on claims that suffering and other harms have more impact or severity than pleasure and other goods; that the amount
View all quotes by Philosophical pessimism"If there is no God to redeem suffering, and if there is no God to ensure that good triumphs over evil, the problem of existence poses itself anew. Is life really worth living if it contains more suffering than happiness, more evil than good, and if it promises no reward or redemption in some life to come?"
"Trophonius and Agamedes are said to have ... built a temple to Apollo at Delphi, offered supplications to the God, and desired of him some extraordinary reward for their care and labour, particularizing nothing, but asking for whatever was best for men. Accordingly, Apollo signified to them that he would bestow it on them in three days, and on the third day at daybreak they were found dead."
"I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive."
"If one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment’s peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness."
"All the goods of life united would not make a very happy man; but all the ills united would make a wretch indeed; and any one of them almost (and who can be free from every one?) nay often the absence of one good (and who can possess all?) is sufficient to render life ineligible."
"Ah, now I understand! Senhor Vasques is Life; Life, monotonous and necessary, commanding and unknowable. This banal man represents the banality of life. On the surface he is everything to me, just as, on the surface, Life is everything to me. And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the fourth-floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living, and which is as monotonous as life itself, but in a different way. Yes, for me Rua dos Douradores embraces the meaning of all things, the resolution of all mysteries, except the existence of mysteries themselves, which is something beyond resolution."