Pessimism Quotes

Life presents innumerable possibilities for love, friendship, compassion, and self-fulfillment, but we must be willing to give in order to receive. Persistence, sacrifice, a quest for knowledge, along with acquaintance with our true self is essential in order to achieve our dreams. Panic, fear, worry, doubt, anger, and a negative attitude are the biggest impediments to self-realization. The most important battle we undertake in life is not with other people; rather it takes place in the human mind.

Disappointment focuses on ‘what is not,’ and completely misses the far greater reality of ‘what now is.

Hatred becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation.

My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.

One day you're waiting for the sky to fallThe next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all

One of the easiest things in life is to judge others. One of the simplest things we can ever do is to tell how wrong people are. One of the most thoughtless things we can ever do is to show people their faults unconstructively. It is always so easy and common to do such things but, before you do that, find the uncommon reasons for the faulty life.Yes! before you do that, identify how to correct a faulty life and before you do that, think of what drives and invokes the joy, slothfulness or the melancholy in people. Until you go through what people have been through, until you experience what has become a part of people, until you understand what drives the real interest of people and until you become fully aware of the real vision, aspirations, desires and the needs of others, ponder before you criticize!

What is more, in fact, we very soon look upon the world as something whose non-existence is not only conceivable, but even preferable to its existence. Therefore our astonishment at it easily passes into a brooding over that *fatality* which could nevertheless bring about its existence, and by virtue of which such an immense force as is demanded for the production and maintenance of such a world could be directed so much against its own interest and advantage."―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171

I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!

I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

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?

No misfortune is so bad that whining about it won’t make it worse. (Apr 2007 Gen Conf)

If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.

Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.

I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and folly does all the talking. Fate is cruel, and human beings are pathetic.

After reading Burgum, [Patricia Highsmith] wrote in her cahier that, like Kafka, she felt she was a pessimist, unable to formulate a system in which an individual could believe in God, government or self. Again like Kafka, she looked into the great abyss which separated the spiritual and the material and saw the terrifying emptiness, the hollowness, at the heart of every man, a sense of alienation she felt compelled to explore in her fiction. As her next hero, she would take an architect, 'a young man whose authority is art and therefore himself,' who when he murders, 'feels no guilt or even fear when he thinks of legal retribution'. The more she read of Kafka the more she felt afraid as she came to realise, 'I am so similar to him.

I write about adversity, I praise adversity, not to be pessimistic, but rather to strengthen myself. The more familiar that you are with it, the less likely you are to have a breakdown when it occurs. You become more reflective of its purpose, you understand God's reason for it, and are then able to make the best of everything that you are handed. The darkness is only frightening after constant sunshine.

Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.

Thankfulness is an attitude of possibilities, not an attitude of liabilities.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience"."What's pessimism?" I said."Religion without God.

How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice,' Amos liked to say. 'Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy.

When Fortune empties her chamberpot on your head smile and say 'We are going to have a summer shower.'

It seemed to me that, no matter what endeavor I was involved in, I was to be something of a sham.

If you are rude, cynical, habitually-sarcastic or pessimistic, your life options are going to be very limited.

School prepares you for the real world... which also bites.

Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide."That is because I know what life is," said Martin.

I have produced no children of my own and my husband is dead," she replied, an acid tone in her voice. "Thus I am more to be pitied than revered. I am expected to give up the shop to my nephew, who will then be able to afford to bring a very good wife from Pakistan. In exchange, I will be given houseroom and no doubt, the honor of taking care of several small children of other family members."The Major was silent. He was at once appalled and also reluctant to hear any more. This was why people usually talked about the weather.

I guess it really had been brave . . . because it was so bugger-all stupid, and if there was one thing I'd come to realize, ti was that bravery and bugger-all stupidity went hand in hand.

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist real

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there’s always another bottom underneath the one we’re laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there’s always endless opportunity above us.

The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.

To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.

These days, there are angry ghosts all around us, dead from wars, sickness, starvation--and nobody cares. So you say you're under a curse? Well, so what? So's the whole damned world.

I am often guilty of expecting the worst so as to avoid disappointment and welcome surprise.

When I look in the glass I see that every line in my face means pessimism but in spite of my face - that is my experience - I remain an optimist.

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

In fact, the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs down, is the clear knowledge that this world's non-existence is just as possible as its existence."―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171

You know how both life and porno movies end. The only difference is life starts with the orgasm.

Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.

No, you pessimistic fool, I am saying that if we can find it in ourselves to be miserable even when things are actually pretty good then there should be no difficulty being happy even when there is gloom and doom all around us.

The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep).Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?

Doubt is a form of pessimism that acts as an agent, which is sent to hinder prosperity on its materilization journey.

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

But pessimism and reality are usually mistaken for each other

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.

Chasms are deceived by rumors of their depth.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice," Amos liked to say. "Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

Masturbation = Imagination + Activity. Worry = Imagination + Negativity.

Apropos, you're going to have to learn to sooner or later that you can't just let other people decide what the world around you should and shouldn't be.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else.

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?