Pessimism

“Passive perception promotes pessimism”

“Why harrow oneself by looking on the worst side?... Because it is sometimes necessary.”

“Some time later, I sat in the wine cellar, staring at the walls while cradling a wineskin in my lap like a child, murmuring over and over as if lulling the child to sleep, 'I am shat upon. I am shat upon'.”

“I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about.”

“‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.”

“You say I can't do it because you can't. Mohammed Ali”

“I'd like very much to make a confident picture. I would like to be as good as nature, which, with a shower, produces flowers and grass to cover the destruction. But we are surrounded by human fragmentation, by pessimism, and it is difficult to talk of other things.”

“There's probably a little greater case for pessimism than optimism. But I do not rule out optimism.”

“However, the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not so hard as it may seem from a long way off, mainly in consequence of the antagonism between the ills of the body and the ills of the mind. If we are in great bodily pain, or the pain lasts a long time, we become indifferent to other troubles; all we think about is to get well. In the same way great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; nay, if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain that accompanies it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering. This is especially evident in the case of those who are driven to suicide by some purely morbid and exaggerated ill-humor. No special effort to overcome their feelings is necessary, nor do such people require to be worked up in order to take the step; but as soon as the keeper into whose charge they are given leaves them for a couple of minutes, they quickly bring their life to an end.When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream: when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.”

“If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.”

“A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.”

“People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is. usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that’s out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist. choices.When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty!”

“I don't know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I'm pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”

“You can do what you want. You can fly as far as you want, be as determined as you want, but sooner or later you have to ask yourself, or the person with you, ‘will there be everything we have hoped for?’ When you realise there’s so little hope left, it is like seeing an entire shadow all over the world.”

“The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.”

“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.”

“Certainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world's heedless drinking at the fount of war.”

“If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on another, it is easy to forget there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism, exactly the same grounds, in fact. That is because we are human. We still have every potential for good as we ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect in one another. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and degradations for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.”

“Human existence is a penal colony; a sexually transmitted disease; a disappointment; nothing but suffering; “a sky-dive: out of a cunt into the grave”; a one-way ticket to the crematorium. “Nobody gets out of here alive”. Every day is a grim passage, a struggle through moments and hours of loneliness, boredom, emptiness, and self-loathing. I count myself among the pessimists. I believe that life is suffering. I force myself (my contraself) to look at other positions, but this remains my default. More specifically, I am a depressive realist.”

“With no positivity, there is no hope; with no negativity, there is no improvement.”