If everyone had seen through everything, if everyone had "understood," — Philosophical pessimism

"What a difference there is between our beginning and our end! The former in the frenzy of desire and the ecstasy of sensual pleasure; the latter in the destruction of all the organs and the musty odour of corpses. The path from birth to death is always downhill as regards well-being and the enjoyment of life; blissfully dreaming childhood, light-hearted youth, toilsome manhood, frail and often pitiable old age, the torture of the last illness, and finally the agony of death. Does it not look exactly as if existence were a false step whose consequences gradually become more and more obvious?"

"We laugh, but inept is our laughter, We should weep, and weep sore, Who are shattered like glass and thereafter Remolded no more."

"Following Schopenhauer, Julius Bahnsen said that we are will, but a will in conflict with itself: always in tension and contradiction. There is no eternal and indivisible will. It is not that the will wants one thing. It wants both. It wants everything, all possibilities. It wants to go and it wants to stay. But we cannot go and stay. We have to choose, which leaves the will forever dissatisfied, because the only way for it to be satisfied is for it to obtain everything it wants, even what is contradictory; but it cannot obtain such a thing."

"Indifference. On the day of your death, the sky will be blue. The birds will be singing. Somewhere in the world there will be a rainbow that will bring joy to a child. A warm breeze will kiss the smile of a happy person. On the day of your death the cruel coldness and indifference of the universe will be revealed."

"It is no more. That conversation, which was so true and intense, ended and now it is nothing. That life, which was lived so intensely, ended and now it is nothing. We are as ephemeral as words."

"The Syndrome. In August 1973 a group of robbers entered the Swedish Credit Bank in Stockholm and took hostages for six days. What no one expected was that the hostages would end up identifying with the robbers/kidnappers. Suddenly they were more afraid of the police and felt that those who were holding them hostage were precisely the only ones who could now protect them. The victims identified with the perpetrators. That event was a small-scale recreation of what happens on a cosmic level. Life is a torment and a curse from the day we are born, but at some point we identify with it. Life is the cause of all our ills. But now we defend it."