"If we glance at the judgments of the greatest minds of all ages, we find those, who have at all found occasion to express their opinion on the subject, pronouncing the condemnation of life in very decided terms. Plato says in the “Apology”: “Now, if death is without all sensation, a dreamless sleep, as it were, it would be indeed a wonderful gain. For I think if any one selected a night in which he had slept so soundly as to have had no dream, and then compared this night with the other nights and days of his life, and after serious consideration declared how many days and nights he had spent better and more pleasantly than this one, that not merely an ordinary mortal, but the great king of Persia himself, would find these but few in number as compared with all his other days and nights.” More clearly and picturesquely it would hardly be possible to state the advantage which, on the average, non-being possesses over being."
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trans. William Chatterton Coupland, Routledge (2010), pp. 613-614
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eduard_von_Hartmann
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