Quotes from Eugene Thacker

An hour of contemplation is preferable to a lifetime of ambition, though neither produces tangible results.

There is no better occasion for pessimism than optimism.

A disgust and revulsion towards the species which has, as a further qualification, the disgust towards ourselves.

Lovecraft expresses this same sentiment as follows: "Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.

Maybe the secret of the pessimistic aphorism is actually quite simple, even formulaic: one is always pretending to be a writer.

Brahman into Atman, God incarnated as Christ, the Word made flesh - that any people at all should be a chosen people is the most depressing thought. Must everything that indifferently transcends the human always be brought back to it?

Language falters where contempt flourishes.

Philosophy as reducible to an alibi for one's existence - for all existents. Hubris. Fear.

In presenting problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes – the crime of not pretending it's all for a reason.

The pull of the organic towards the inorganic, of the animate towards the inanimate, of the living towards the unliving - the pull towards something "old." In these moments, the human being is turned inside-out, revealing the entirety of human civilization as a bg-brain neurosis, beneath which a deeper, multi-layered geo-trauma manifests itself in a myriad of ways, from frenetic protozoa to the torpid, stumbling forth of human self-awareness.

If historical mysticism is, in the last instance, theological, then mysticism today, a mysticism of the unhuman, would have to be, in the last instance, climatological. It is a kind of mysticism that can only be expressed in the dust of this planet.

Leopardi: "True misanthropes are not found in isolation but among people, for it is practical experience in life, not philosophy, that makes us hate.

When someone casually asks me "How are you doing?", I sometimes find myself hesitating, as if caught in a micro-catatonia. The question is both petty and cosmic at the same time. Then I remember: just say "Fine.

I long for someone to invent a punctuation mark for despondency…)

The expository head has a message (though not its own message), a message whose efficacy derives, in part, from the almost metaphysical presence of the head, and the equally metaphysical absence of the body.

Why do we all know so much? And why do we feel the unbearable urge to tell each other that we know so much? It's as if we are burdened by the question of what to do with thought, by our brains, by the very weight of the organ…

You can only force a smile for so long until it becomes a grimace.

The last word of philosophy is loneliness.

To live in constant apprehension of life. Exhaustion before one has made the effort. To attempt to laugh at it all, until the laughter becomes slightly sad, until tedium covers everything with its tenebrous haze.

The longer we suffer, the more we dwell on suffering – eventually suffering and the thought of suffering eclipse each other entirely…

Afraid to be content. Content to be sad.

But the truth is that I am a pessimist… except when writing about pessimism. I've managed to make pessimism a form of therapy.

Afraid to be happy. Content to be sad.

Enthusiasm as a form of depression.