In this topic I’m going to share with you some quotes from the great thinkers of all time which mostly deal with pessimism and absurdity of life.
This shows that the great thinkers and poets throughout history have agreed upon the fact that life is full of suffering and it is ultimately meaningless. As David Hume (1711 - 1776) once wrote:
When I consider the subject with the utmost impartiality, and take the most comprehensive view of it, I find myself more inclined to think, that evil predominates in the world, and am apt to regard human life as a scene of misery, according to the sentiments of the greatest sages as well as of the generality of mankind, from the beginning of the world to his day. David Hume, Fragment on evil
To find the most interesting quotes, I will get help from a quote book called The Dark Side: Thoughts on the Futility of Life from the Ancient Greeks to the Present, but I won’t confine myself to this book and will add some other quotes that I have come across with in my studies.
If you’re currently suffering from depression please don’t follow this topic.
One last word: although I believe that life is absurd and nonexistence is better than existence and procreation is morally wrong, I still think that we should enjoy our lives as much as we can and we should help to build a better world for each other. I have written more about this approach in another topic:
Seeing their tears flow, pitying them, Lord Zeus
bent his head and murmured in his heart:
“Poor things, why did I give you to King Pêleus,
a mortal, you who never age nor die,
to let you ache with men in their hard lot? Of all creatures that breathe and move on earth none is more to be pitied than a man.
What intelligence or insight do they have? They trust the people’s bards and take for their teacher the mob, not realizing that Most men are bad, few good.
Heraclitus of Ephesus
The First Philosophers, The Presocratics and Sophists, Translated with commentary by ROBIN WATERFIELD, p 38
Go over now all those you have known yourself, one after the other: one man follows a friend’s funeral and is then laid out himself, then another follows him – and all in a brief space of time.
The conclusion of this?
You should always look on human life as short and cheap.
Yesterday sperm: tomorrow a mummy or ashes.
In all this murk and dirt, in all this flux of being, time,
movement, things moved, I cannot begin to see what on earth there is to value or even to aim for.
Rather the opposite: one should console oneself with the anticipation of natural release.
Just as you see your bath – all soap, sweat, grime, greasy water, the whole thing disgusting – so is every part of life and every object in it.
When you are high in indignation and perhaps losing patience, remember that human life is a mere fragment of time and shortly we are all in our graves.
Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
The stream of tears that you have shed as you roamed and wandered through this long course, weeping and wailing because of being united with the disagreeable and separated from the agreeable—this alone is more than the water in the four great oceans. For a long time, monks, you have experienced the death of a mother; as you have experienced this, weeping and wailing because of being united with the disagreeable and separated from the agreeable, the stream of tears that you have shed is more than the water in the four great oceans.
In the Buddha’s Words, Edited and introduced by Bhikkhu Bodhi
Get thee to a nunnery! Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves – believe none of us.
هملت خطاب به افیلیا: برو به صومعه پناه ببر، چرا تو گناهکارانی را به دنیا بیاوری؟ من خود از لحاظ درستکاری آدمی عادیم ولی می توانم خود را در برخی مسائل چنان مقصر بدانم که بهتر بود مادرم مرا به دنیا نیاورده بود. من شخصی مغرور و انتقامجو و جاه طلبم و بار خطاهایی را بر پشت خویش دارم که به فکرم نمی رسد که چگونه و چه وقت آنها را مرتکب شدم. مردمی مثل من که بین زمین و آسمان می خزند چه می توانند کرد؟ ما همه دغلبازان خطاکاری هستیم که نباید مورد اعتماد باشیم.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
زندگی سایه متحرکی بیش نیست؛ بازیگر بیچاره ای است که لحظه ای با طمطراق روی صحنه می خرامد و بعد دیگر خبری از او نیست؛ یا داستانی که فردی ابله نقل می کند؛ پر از طغیان است و شر و شور ولی مفهومی ندارد.
The whole earth, believe me, Philo, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war goes on among all living creatures. Need, hunger, and deprivation stimulate the strong and courageous; fear, anxiety and terror agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life brings distress to the new-born infant and to its wretched mother, weakness, impotence and distress accompany each stage of that life: and eventually it reaches its end in agony and horror.
باور کن فیلو که سراسر زمین نفرین شده و آلوده است. آتش جنگی همیشگی میان جمله آفریدگان زنده برپاست. ضرورت و گرسنگی و نیاز، پُرزوران و دلاوران را به کار وا می دارد، ترس و دل آشوبه و هراس، ضعیفان و ناتوانان را برآشفته می سازد، ورود نخستین به عرصه ی زندگی، دلهره می دهد به طفل نوزاده و مادر بیچاره، ضعف و عجز و محنت همراه تک تک مرحله های آن زندگی است، همان که سرانجام در عذاب و وحشت پایان می گیرد.
If an alien suddenly arrived in this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with criminals and debtors, a field of battle with corpses all over it, a fleet of ships sinking in the ocean, a nation suffering under tyranny, famine, or plague. To turn the cheerful side of life to him and give him a notion of its pleasures, where should I take him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might reasonably think that I was only showing him other kinds of distress and sorrow.
بیمارستانی پر از ناراحتی ها، زندانی آکنده از تبهکاران و بدهکاران، میدان نبردی پوشیده از جسدها، ناوگانی که غرقه می رود در اقیانوس، و ملتی که از خودکامگی، قحطی یا طاعون پژمرده می شود. اگر ناگاه غریبه ای به این جهان سر بزند اینها را نشانش میدهم چونان نمونه ای از ناخوبی های آن، اگر بخواهم جانب شاد زندگی را به سوی او بگردانم و انگاره ای از لذتهای آن را به وی بدهم، به کجا باید راهنمائیش کنم؟ به یک مجلس رقص؟ اپرا یا دربار؟ شاید به حق چنین اندیشد که فقط چندین گونه محنت و حزن را به وی نشان می داده ام.
David Hume, Dialogues concerning natural religion, chapter 10 دیوید هیوم، گفت و گوهایی درباب دین طبیعی، ترجمه حمید اسکندری
We hope for truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty.
We seek happiness, and find only misery and death.
As for me, I declare that as soon as the Christian religion reveals the principle that human nature is corrupt and has fallen away from God, that opens my eyes to see signs of this truth everywhere; for nature testifies everywhere—both within man and outside him—to a lost God and a corrupt nature.
Man is wicked and miserable. Everybody is aware of this from what goes on within himself, and from the commerce he is obliged to carry on with his neighbor. It suffices to have been alive for five or sixf8 years to be completely convinced of these two truths. Those who live long and who are much involved in worldly affairs know this still more clearly. Travel gives continual lessons of this. Monuments to human misery and wickedness are found everywhere_ prisons, hospitals, gallows, and beggars. Here you see the ruins of a flourishing city; in other places you cannot even find the ruins.
Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.
Pierre BAYLE, Historical and Critical DICTIONARY, SELECTIONS, Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by RICHARD H. POPKIN. The Entry of Manicheans
Page 146 & 147
Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
If you try to imagine as nearly as you can what an amount of misery, pain, and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if on the earth as little as on the moon the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.
Then I returned and considered all the oppression that is done under the sun: and look! The tears of the oppressed, but they have no comforter — on the side of their oppressors there is power, but they have no comforter. Therefore I praised the dead who were already dead, more than the living who are still alive. Yet, better than both is he who has never existed, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.
But for what purpose was this world created then? said Candide.
To drive us mad, replied Martin.
Do you think, said Candide, that men have always massacred each other the way they do now? that they’ve always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands? that they’ve always been feeble, fickle, envious, gluttonous, drunken, avaricious, ambitious, blood-thirsty, slanderous, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and stupid? Do you think, said Martin, that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they find them? Yes, no doubt, said Candide.
Well, then, said Martin, if hawks have always had the same character, why do you expect men to have changed theirs?
Men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus(A man is a wolf to another man). Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?
I am disagree with this definition of the human because I believe that the human is a helpless creature and i always have a pity for them(him or her) and Dostoyevsky was unfair about humankind
