Quotes About Pessimism

I had always detested the meddlesome alarmist, who veils ignorance under noisiness, and for ever wails his chant of lugubrious pessimism.

A scale of your emotions would look something like this: Joy/Knowledge/Empowerment/Freedom/Love/Appreciation Passion Enthusiasm/Eagerness/Happiness Positive Expectation/Belief Optimism Hopefulness Contentment Boredom Pessimism Frustration/Irritation/Impatience "Overwhelment" Disappointment Doubt Worry Blame Discouragement Anger Revenge atred/Rage Jealousy Insecurity/Guilt/Unworthiness Fear/Grief/Depression/Despair/Powerlessness

In a culture that prizes the can-do, self-starter attitude, to be a pessimist is simply to be a complainer – if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem. To live in such a culture is to constantly live in the shadow of an obligatory optimism, a novel type of coercion that is pathologized early on in child education in the assessment: "Does not like to play with others.

Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a lyricism written in the graveyard of philosophy.

When solutions produce problems, when thought flounders in the absence of order, unity, and purpose, when healthy skepticism turns into pathological sarcasm – this is usually when pessimism enters the fray.

There is no surer sign of pessimism than an overly-optimistic person.

There will always be someone who will see the futility of your actions. There will always be someone who is irritated by what you do, whatever you do. In this way we participate in a kind of shared, communal pessimism.

Whenever it occurs, however it occurs, pessimism has but one effect: it introduces humility into thought. It undermines the innumerable, self-aggrandizing postures that constitute the human being. Pessimism is the humility of the species that has named itself, thought furtively stumbling upon its own limitations on black wings of futility.

For optimists, the most perplexing question is how one becomes a pessimist – if one is not born one. For the pessimist, the question is how each person, by virtue of being born, is not already a pessimist.

Are you a pessimist?" "On my better days…

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?

A bit of philosophizing leads to a wonderment of life. A lot of philosophizing leads to a contempt of it.

If one is willing to go down this path, retinal pessimism is not just about the non-color that is black, but it is about the perception of color itself. It is, ultimately, the suspicion that all colors are black, that all retinal activity is retinal inactivity. Retinal pessimism: there is nothing to see (and you're seeing it).

There is no better occasion for pessimism than optimism.

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

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.

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

A saying from the Desert Fathers reads: "It is frightening to die, it is even more perilous to live a long life." If only pessimism had the devotion of the ascetics.

From the austere negations of the ancient Indian materialists, to the funereal perambulations of Schopenhauer, pessimism also has its own ontological argument: existence is that beyond which nothing worse can be conceived.

Pessimism's propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke.

Voltaire once described optimism as "a cruel philosophy with a consoling name," which immediately suggests what pessimism might be: a consoling philosophy with a cruel name.

One senses that for Schopenhauer, the world does exist, and it's horrible, and there's not much one can do about it.

If the glass is half-full or half-empty, it remains the same glass.

I think a pessimist is just an optimist who has had their heart repeatedly broken.