Philosophical Pessimism Quotes

Lacan , Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction.

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?

Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.

Like Leibniz's possible worlds, most men are only equally entitled pretenders to existence. There are few existences.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.

Human life must be some form of mistake.

Hell is other people.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

Evolution throws a wonderful light on all the struggles, eccentricities, tortuous developments of the human conscience in the past. It is the only theory of morals that does. And evolution throws just as much light on the ethical and social struggle today; and it is the only theory that does. What a strange age ours is from the religious point of view! What a hopeless age from the philosopher's point of view! Yet it is a very good age, the best that ever was. No evolutionist is a pessimist.

My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man, and I don’t believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don’t put my philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger then my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing.

I will not die, it's the world that will end." paraphrase of unknown philosopher

My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I'm not a sad man, and I don't believe I sadden anyone else.

Morality is the weakness of the brain.

Man Is Something That Must Be Overcome

I worship impersonal Nature, which is neither 'good' or 'bad', and who knows neither love nor hatred.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

I don't think we are here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating a good lunch.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.