Quotes About Pessimism

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little." Mark Twain

He stood a few meters from the step and spoke with great conviction, great joy. Alles ist Scheisse, he announced. All is shit.

Only God is able. It is faith in Him that we must rediscover. With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy and bring new light into the dark caverns of pessimism.

Life was very sad if there were not - and unbearably so if one's experience with romantic love turned one into an incurable cynic.

We can't waste our time thinking about such things," she said. "Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past.

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.

There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.

Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.

Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse?until at last the worst of all arrives.

I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind.

optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity.

Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend mine reflecting on it.

The truth is that we ought to be wretched, and are so.

Your University professors are bound to preach optimism; and it is an easy and agreeable task to upset their theories.

Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

there is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.

Not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, is the tormenting problem of metaphysics.

It is no longer sufficient to love others as himself and to do as much for them as he would do for himself; rather, a repugnance arises in him… towards the will-to-live, towards the core and essence of that world recognized as filled with misery.

the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.

Arthur Schopenhauer

is it at all possible for you to prevent your washed-up cynicism from completely coloring everything?

Both life and nature are black.

These views were voiced by the school of 'optessimists', i.e. philosophers who derived optimism for the future from a pessimistic appraisal of the present. The 21st Voyage, The Star Diaries

Der Pessimismus der Vernunft verpflichtet zum Optimismus des Willens!