The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
Gustave Flaubert
Besides, Demea, think about this very society through which we get the upper hand over those wild beasts, our natural enemies: what new enemies it raises against us!
What woe and misery it causes! Man is the greatest enemy of man. Oppression, injustice, contempt, disrespect, violence, sedition, war, slander, treachery, fraud—men use these to torment one another, and they would soon dissolve the society they had formed if they weren’t afraid that even greater ills would come from their doing so.The disorders of the mind, continued Demea, though they are more secret may be no less dismal and vexatious.
Remorse, shame, anguish, rage, disappointment, anxiety, fear, dejection, despair; who has ever passed through life without cruel attacks from these tormentors? Many people have scarcely ever felt any better sensations than those!
Labour and poverty, so hated by everyone, are the certain fate of the majority, and the privileged few who enjoy leisure and wealth never reach contentment or true happiness.
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Chapter 10
Misery comes at last to the healthy man, the end of life is sorrow.
The Epic of Gilgames
when for the first time I read the set of conversation of Plato I realized that life can be beautiful but sometime. all of the life can’t be tragedy. there are beautiful moments.
Yes. I like Khayyam’s approach. In his poems he maintains a pessimistic worldview, yet he recommends enjoying life as much as possible.
ای دوست بیا تا غمِ فردا نخوریم
وین یک دمِ عمر را غنیمت شمریم
فردا که ازین دیرِ فنا درگذریم
با هفتهزارسالگان سربهسریم
There is no way to escape such striking instances, said Philo, except by explaining them away—and that makes the indictment even more severe. Why, I ask, have all men in all ages complained incessantly of the miseries of life?
Someone replies: ‘They have no good reason: they complain only because they are disposed to be discontented, regretful, anxious.’ I reply: what greater guarantee of misery could there be than to have such a wretched temperament?
‘But if they were really as unhappy as they claim,’ says my antagonist, ‘why do they stay alive?’ Not satisfied with life, afraid of death. [Milton, Paradise Lost] This is the secret chain that holds us, I reply. We are terrified, not bribed, into continuing our existence.
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Chapter 10
If man really sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility.
Stanley Kubrick
And I gave peace to my children for they are in the bliss of the abyss
Which surpasses all the pleasures of the world,
And had they been born they would’ve endured misery.
― Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, The Arab Poet
A time there was—as one may guess
And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell—
before the birth of consciousness,
When all went well.
None suffered sickness, love, or loss,
None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;
None cared whatever crash or cross
Brought wrack to things.
If something ceased, no tongue bewailed,
If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;
If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed.
No sense was stung.
But the disease of feeling germed,
And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong:
Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed
How long, how long?
Thomas Hardy, Before life and after
Addressed to Nature:
Thus I reply to you. I am well aware you did not make the world for the service of men. It were easier to believe that you made it expressly as a place of torment for them. But tell me: why am I here at all? Did I ask to come into the world? Or am I here unnaturally, contrary to your will? If however, you yourself have placed me here, without giving me the power of acceptance or refusal of this gift of life, ought you not as far as possible to try and make me happy, or at least preserve me from the evils and dangers, which render my sojourn a painful one? And what I say of myself, I say of the whole human race, and of every living creature.
Giacomo Leopardi, Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander
Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part 11
Nothing is so deceptive as the life of man, nothing is so treacherous: no one, I swear, would have accepted it as a present, if it were not given to us in a state of ignorance.
Accordingly, if the greatest fortune is not to be born, the next best, I think, is to die after a short life and be restored to one’s original state.
Seneca, Consolation to Marcia
History shows us the life of nations and can find nothing to relate except wars and insurrections; the years of peace appear here and there only as short pauses, as intervals between the acts. And in the same way, the life of the individual is a perpetual struggle, not merely metaphorically with want and boredom but actually with others. Everywhere one finds an opponent, lives in constant conflict, and dies weapon in hand.
Suppose the human race were removed to Utopia where everything grew automatically and pigeons flew about ready roasted; where everyone at once found their sweetheart and had no difficulty in keeping them; then people would die of boredom or hang themselves; or else they would fight, throttle, and murder one another and so cause themselves more suffering than is now laid upon them by nature. Thus for such a race, no other scene, no other existence, is suitable.
The world is just a hell and in it human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand, and the devils on the other.
In fact, the conviction that the world
and thus also humanity is something that really ought not to be, is calculated to fill us with forbearance towards one another; for what can we expect from beings in such a predicament? In fact from this point of view it might occur to us that the really proper address between one person and another should be, instead of Sir, Monsieur, and so on, Leidensgefährte, socci malorum, compagnon de misères, my fellow-sufferer.
However strange this may sound, it accords with the facts, puts the other person in the most correct light, and reminds us of that most necessary thing, tolerance, patience, forbearance, and love of one’s neighbour, which everyone needs and each of us, therefore, owes to another.
Arthur Schopenhauer, On The Suffering of the World
This world is the battleground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. Therefore, every beast of prey in it is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of torturing deaths.
Arthur Schopenhauer,
ON THE VANITY AND SUFFERING OF LIFE
Depression, angst, a refusal to eat, and so forth, are taken without exception to be marks of a pathological condition, and are treated accordingly. In many cases, however, these phenomena are indications of a deeper, more immediate experience of what life is all about, bitter fruits of the genius of the mind or emotion, which is at the root of every antibiological tendency. It is not the soul that is ill, but its defense mechanism that either fails or is abjured because it is considered—correctly—as a betrayal of man’s most potent gift.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah
In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.
Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Humorous Pessimist (1990 documentary)
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach.
Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born