Antinatalists

"Each new generation asks – What is the meaning of life? A more fertile way of putting the question would be – Why does man need a meaning to life?"

"When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence."

"Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world."

"A central aspect of punishment by imprisonment is that most opportunities for diversion are denied the prisoner. And, there being few other means for protecting oneself against angst, prisoners are for the most part constantly on the brink of utter despair. Any measures he can find to stave off this despair are justified as an attempt to preserve life itself; for the moment he experiences his soul alone in the universe, there is nothing else to see but the categorical impossibility of existence."

"Depression, angst, a refusal to eat, and so forth, are taken without exception to be marks of a pathological condition, and are treated accordingly. In many cases, however, these phenomena are indications of a deeper, more immediate experience of what life is all about, bitter fruits of the genius of the mind or emotion, which is at the root of every antibiological tendency. It is not the soul that is ill, but its defense mechanism that either fails or is abjured because it is considered—correctly—as a betrayal of man's most potent gift."

"Nobody has ever managed to explain what it is they are longing after in religion, but it is quite clear what they are trying to escape from – this earthly vale of tears, one’s untenable existential situation."

"The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn’t seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer."

"One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind. Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive. That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole."

"To bear children into this world is like carrying wood into a burning house."

"Man became fearful of life itself – indeed, of his very being. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happen arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle."

"We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness."

"Hvorfor er menneskeslegten da ikke forlængst dødd ut under store vanvidsepidemier? Hvorfor er der bare et forholdsvis ringe antal individer som forkommer fordi de ikke kan holde livspresset ut, – fordi erkjendelsen gir dem mer enn de kan bære? Saavel aandshistorien som iagttagelsen av os selv og andre gir basis for følgende svar: De fleste mennesker lærer at redde sig ved kunstig at redusere sit bevissthetsindhold."

"Nobody more than Leopardi could look disaster in the face, never denying that it was disaster, yet at the same time turning unhappiness itself into a colour or fragrance that would help you through the day."

"How should the endless rush of events not bring satiety, surfeit, loathing? So the boldest of us is ready perhaps at last to say from his heart with Giacomo Leopardi: "Nothing lives that were worth thy pains, and the earth deserves not a sigh. Our being is pain and weariness, and the world is mud—nothing else. Be calm.""

"Yet no one has so thoroughly and exhaustively handled this subject as, in our own day, Leopardi. He is entirely filled and penetrated by it: his theme is everywhere the mockery and wretchedness of this existence; he presents it upon every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such wealth of imagery that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, is throughout entertaining and exciting."

"Nature, mother feared and wept for since the human family was born, marvel that cannot be praised, that bears and nurtures only to destroy, if dying young brings mortals pain, why let it come down on these blameless heads? And if good, then why is it unhappy, why make this leaving inconsolable, worse than any other woe, for those who live, as well as those who go?"

"Non ha natura al seme Dell'uom più stima o cura Che alla formica: e se più rara in quello Che nell'altra è la strage, Non avvien ciò d'altronde uor che l'uom sue prosapie ha men feconde."

"Rest for ever (heart) enough Hast thou throbbed. Nothing is worth Thy agitations, nor of sighs is worthy The earth. Bitterness and vexation Is life, never aught besides, and mire the world. Quiet thyself henceforth. Despair For the last time. To our race fate Has given but death. Henceforth despise Thyself, nature, the foul Power which, hidden, rules to the common bane, And the infinite vanity of the whole."

"You laugh openly and loudly about something, even entirely innocently, with one or two people in a café, in a conversation, in a street: everybody who hears or sees you laughing like this will turn and look at you with respect; if they were talking, they will stop, they will seem humbled; they will never dare to laugh at you; if they had previously looked at you boldly or condescendingly, they will lose their boldness and condescension toward you. In the end, simply laughing out loud gives you a definite superiority over all those near and around you, without exception. The power of laughter is terrible and awful: anyone who has the courage to laugh is master over others, in the same way as anyone who has the courage to die."

"Those innumerable and immense questions about time and space, argued over from the beginnings of metaphysics onward, by metaphysicians of every century, are none other than wars of words, caused by misunderstandings, and imprecision of thought, and limited ability to understand our mind, which is the only place where time and space, like many other abstract things, exist independently and for themselves, and are something."

"Stato che sia, dentro covile o cuna, È funesto a chi nasce il dì natale."

"Leopardi is a poet who is very dark. It fascinates me that Mark Strand did that lovely, heartbreaking version of his poem. It's the way that Leopardi makes his incredibly courageous attempt, even though he knows he cannot excel Dante and Petrarch. He's a great literary critic, as his great notebook, Zibaldone, shows. He does it by going back to Lucretius (rather than Virgil), by treating all of Latin poetry as what changes into the Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He is a signal instance of the modern sublime, which is always a Lucretian-Epicurean sublime as it is in Walt Whitman. It's no surprise Whitman reads Lucretius in translation, and we know his father bought it. He comments on it. Leopardi, of all later Italian poets, is not only the greatest after Dante and Petrarch, but his sensibility is closest to that of high Romanticism in English, that is England and the United States. So far as I know, Hart Crane never mentions Leopardi, but I can't read Leopardi without thinking of Crane."

"I found myself desperately bored with life, with a very strong desire to kill myself, and had an intimation of something bad, which frightened me at the very moment that I wanted to die, and placed me immediately in a state of apprehension and anxiety. I have never felt so strongly the absolute conflict of the elements that form the present human condition, forced to fear for its life and to seek at all costs to preserve it, just then when it was most burdensome, and when it could resolve to be ended by its own will (but by no other cause)."

"Two truths that most men will never believe: one that we know nothing, the other that we are nothing. Add the third, which depends a lot on the second: that there is nothing to hope for after death."

"Children find everything in nothing, men find nothing in everything."

"No one can truthfully boast or say in anger: I cannot be unhappier than I am."

"Everything is evil. I mean, everything that is, is wicked; every existing thing is an evil; everything exists for a wicked end. Existence is a wickedness and is ordained for wickedness. Evil is the end, the final purpose, of the universe...The only good is nonbeing; the only really good thing is the thing that is not, things that are not things; all things are bad."

"My philosophy isn’t only not conducive to misanthropy, as it might appear to a superficial reader, and as many have accused me. It essentially rules out misanthropy, it tends toward healing, to dissolving discontent and hatred. Not knee-jerk hatred but the deep-dyed hatred that unreflective people who would deny being misanthropes so cordially bear (habitually or on select occasions) toward their own kind in response to hurts they receive—as we all do, justly or not—from others. My philosophy holds nature guilty of everything, it acquits mankind completely and directs our hate, or at least our lamentations, to its matrix, to the true origin of the afflictions living creatures suffer, etc."

"No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act and thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought."

"What is Leopardi's place in literature? That assigned to him by his countrymen is very high, higher than they would concede to any other Italian poet born since the close of the sixteenth century."

"Whilst they discussed these and similar questions, two lions are said to have suddenly appeared. The beasts were so enfeebled and emaciated with hunger that they were scarcely able to devour the Icelander. They accomplished the feat however, and thus gained sufficient strength to live to the end of the day."

"ICELANDER: So say all the philosophers. But since that which is destroyed suffers, and that which is born from its destruction also suffers in due course, and finally is in its turn destroyed, would you enlighten me on one point, about which hitherto no philosopher has satisfied me? For whose pleasure and service is this wretched life of the world maintained, by the suffering and death of all the beings which compose it?"

"It seems as though death were the essential aim of all things. That which has no existence cannot die; yet all that exists has proceeded from nothing. The final cause of existence is not happiness, for nothing is happy. It is true, living creatures seek this end in all their works, but none obtain it; and during all their life, ever deceiving, tormenting, and exerting themselves, they suffer indeed for no other purpose than to die."

"NATURE: So flees the squirrel from the rattlesnake, and runs in its haste deliberately into the mouth of its tormentor. I am that from which thou fleest."

"Boredom is in some ways the most sublime of human feelings. It is not that I think an examination of this feeling gives rise to those consequences that many philosophers have claimed to have inferred. Nevertheless, not being able to be satisfied with any earthly thing or, so to speak, with the whole earth; considering the immeasurable extent of space, the number and the wonderful size of the worlds, and finding that everything is small and petty in comparison with the capacity of one's own mind; picturing to oneself the infinite number of worlds, and the infinite universe, and feeling that the soul and our desire must be still greater than such a universe; always accusing things of insufficiency and nothingness; and suffering a huge lack and emptiness, and therefore boredom — all this seems to me the greatest sign of grandeur and nobility which there is in human nature. And so boredom is seldom seen in men of no account, and very seldom or never in other creatures."

"ICELANDER: Thus I reply to you. I am well aware you did not make the world for the service of men. It were easier to believe that you made it expressly as a place of torment for them. But tell me: why am I here at all? Did I ask to come into the world? Or am I here unnaturally, contrary to your will? If however, you yourself have placed me here, without giving me the power of acceptance or refusal of this gift of life, ought you not as far as possible to try and make me happy, or at least preserve me from the evils and dangers, which render my sojourn a painful one? And what I say of myself, I say of the whole human race, and of every living creature."

"[T]he recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul when it is conveyed by a work of genius. And the spectacle of nothingness is itself a thing in these works, and seems to enlarge the reader’s soul, to raise it up and to make it take satisfaction in itself and its despair."

"Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age."

"Il piacere è sempre o passato o futuro, non mai presente."

"In every land the universal vices and ills of mankind and of human society are noted as peculiar to that place. I have never been anywhere where I have not heard, "Here the women are vain and inconstant; they read little and they're poorly educated. Here the public are curious about other people's affairs, and they're very talkative and slanderous. Here money, favour and baseness can achieve anything. Here envy rules, and friendships are hardly sincere," and so on and so on, as if things went on differently elsewhere. Men are wretched by necessity, and determined to believe themselves wretched by accident."

"For him, death does not just end life; it nullifies life, and the fact that we are going to die is the only fact that matters. The key to the terrible power of his work is that we can never totally banish the suspicion that he might be right."

"Every fucking week there's some celebrity or comic or an athlete that has to apologize for a caught on tape comment, or insensitive joke, a drunk tweet. And they have a press conference, and it's always something that's way weaker than the shit I say every night-- as a segue I say worse shit, nobody ever asks me to apologize. I wouldn't, but I wanna be asked one time. I've got way better shit than they do, I demand outrage for God's sakes, what do I have to do? I could've told that joke at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance and people would go, "Huh? What'd he say? I wasn't listening.""

"The thing with the word "retarded" is that "retarded" is not like other epithets, it was not a word of hatred. Retarded was the medical definition, was actually a word actually born in sensitivity. 'Cause they used to call them, before retarded was the word, doctors would use "imbecile" or "moron". This is something a smart fuck at Harvard has labelled "The Euphemism Treadmill": moron and imbecile were the correct terms for a while, and what happened is we co-opted those words to call our friend when he does something incredibly stupid, to the point where it became an insult. So out of sensitivity, they changed the word to "retarded"... and what happened was we co-opted that word to call our friend when he does something incredibly stupid. So you can keep changing the word, and if you make the new one stick, that's what I'm going to call my friend. "Did you just put a metal plate in a microwave? What are you, developmentally disabled? You don't fucking put a metal plate in a microwave, who doesn't know that?" You can make it as difficult to pronounce and Latin-based and medical-rooted, and if you make it stick, that's the new word I'm going to call my friend when he trips over his own shoelaces: "Ha ha! You just exhibited some of the atlantoaxial instability that is usually associated with the trisomie 21 genetic imbalance!""

"As an openly gay comedian, I feel a responsibility to talk about a lot of issues that-- What? Are you gonna test me? You don't know if I'm lying. I can be as gay as I want to be up here, fuck you. What, are you going to strap me to a chair and blow loads in my face to see if I'm fibbing when I say I love it?"

"Proof of the afterlife is this: if there were no afterlife, how could my mother have bought me and my friends so many nice things from the SkyMall catalogue on her credit card four days after she passed from this Earth? Answer me that, Your Honor! Answer me that! In fact, I'd like to enter these credit card receipts into evidence against the advice of my attorney! [...] That last piece of that story has special meaning to me because in my entire career, that's the only chunk of material I've ever had that had a statute of limitations before I could comfortably tell it on stage. Three year statute for credit card fraud, after that: fuck you."

"I love homosexuality, I defend it. But I hate faginess, because it's aesthetically unpleasing, the whole [frolics] "La la la la!" You don't have to do that. I have nothing against Jewish people, I hate Jewiness, the clammy [whiny] "Nyah nyah nyah, I get all... I'm allergic," personally that's unpleasing. I hate anyone who leads with their sexuality, homo or hetero. If I know your sexuality in the first 30 seconds of meeting you, you're fucking annoying. Heteros are the same way, if you have naked lady mud flaps or you go, "Oh, after your show you want to go to Hooters?" or you just watch the game for the cheerleaders, just go into a basement and jerk off, you fucking teenager, 13-year-old, and then come back when we can have a regular conversation."

"Tradition and heritage are all dead people's baggage. Stop carrying it. Move forward."

"We live in a world where people will have a GPS and a crucifix on the same dashboard — and you want me to have hope for these fuckin' monkeys on swing-sets?"

"There's no such thing as addiction, there's only things that you enjoy doing more than life."

"Put your fucking camera away, you stupid fucking tourist of life! There's a whole generation of shitheads just filming every fucking thing they do. "I'm gonna film my entire life and watch it later!""