Quotes related to Discontinuation

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A collection of quotes by famous people that are related to Discontinuation.

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Contents 1 Zapffe 2 Arthur Schopenhauer 3 Thomas Ligotti 4 George Bernard Shaw 5 William Shakespeare 6 The Bible 7 Others

[edit] Zapffe

• "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. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world". - Peter Wessel Zapffe

• "The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty." - Peter Wessel Zapffe

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

• "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". - Peter Wessel Zapffe

• "It is said of the nihilist that ”to him, nothing is sacred”. He might reply that at least he does not sanctify the lie, the common compulsory living-lie; be it expressed as optimism about civilisation or as the falsettos and tightened throats of those who must hide the disconcerting facts to children, so these are not frightened witless even at the outset." - Zapffe

• "A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness." - Zapffe

[edit] Arthur Schopenhauer

• "If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would 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." - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) from "On the Sufferings of the World" (1851)

• "If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state." - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) from "On the Sufferings of the World" (1851)

• "And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat." - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) from "On the Sufferings of the World" (1851)

• "I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless— because I speak the truth; and people prefer to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers in peace! At any rate, do not ask us to accommodate our doctrines to the lessons you have been taught. That is what those rascals of sham philosophers will do for you. Ask them for any doctrine you please, and you will get it. Your University professors are bound to preach optimism; and it is an easy and agreeable task to upset their theories." - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) from "On the Sufferings of the World" (1851)

• "There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be. These things cannot be reconciled with any such belief." - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) from "On the Sufferings of the World" (1851)

[edit] Thomas Ligotti

• "We’re born into a society that encourages us to distract ourselves with such things as movies and books, then we have them forced upon us in schools and by other people, and we’re never allowed to have a clue that there might be some other way to exist other than having our brains constantly stimulated and operating like popcorn machines even when afforded the leisure to function, or at least try to function, in a way that would bring us face to face with the inescapable troubles of existence and perhaps enable us to deal with those troubles by more effective means than those offered by the entertainment industry." - Thomas Ligotti, in an interview in Fantastic Metropolis Magazine, October 31st, 2004 (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/ligotti/full/)

• "...the insignificance of the human race in a dizzyingly inscrutable universe ruled by forces incomprehensible to our species...is the most profound and obvious fact of life." - Thomas Ligotti, in an interview in Fantastic Metropolis Magazine, October 31st, 2004 (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/ligotti/full/)

• "...everything in this life—I repeat, everything—is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble." - Thomas Ligotti, in an interview in Fantastic Metropolis Magazine, October 31st, 2004 (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/ligotti/full/)

• "Real life misery is a mess or a bore or simply too heartbreaking to tolerate. And there’s no coherence to it—no vision. As Mark Twain said, "Life is just one damn thing after another." I don’t want to be a spectator to this any more than I must be. I want to attend to the words of someone who will stand up and say, "Life is just one damn thing after another" - Thomas Ligotti, in an interview in Fantastic Metropolis Magazine, October 31st, 2004 (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/ligotti/full/)

[edit] George Bernard Shaw

• "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

• "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw

[edit] William Shakespeare

• "When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing." - Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, lines 22-31

[edit] The Bible

• "As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away, so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more." Job 7:9

• "Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness. The wise man's eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness: and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them all. Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool." Ecclesiastes 2:13-16

• "Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me... For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night." Ecclesiastes 2:17-18, 22-23

• "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?" Ecclesiastes 3:19-21

• "As he came forth of his mother's womb, naked shall he return to go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labour, which he may carry away in his hand." Ecclesiastes 5:15

[edit] Others

• "Any philosophy worth taking seriously would have to be built upon a firm foundation of unyielding despair." - Bertrand Russell

• "... a guy who'll tell the truth in this bullshit world, he's worth his weight in gold." - Preacher comics, Volume 5 pg. 165

• "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

• "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." - 'Princess Bride'

• "It would be nice to tell you to seek solace in science and technology. But experience shows that scientists and technologists are normal human beings; folks who are like sheep and cattle and are not yet aware of the utter foolishness of the world they live in." - Ozodi Thomas Osuji, THE METAPHYSICAL NEW MAN AND NEW SOCIETY

• "For humans can perceive that each individual being is an ephemeral eddy in the flow of life, subjected to brute contingencies on his or her way to annihilation. Yet only rarely do persons lose their minds through this realisation, as our brains have evolved a strict regime of self-censorship - better known as `civilisation.'" - Gisle R. Tangenes, summarizing the philosophy of Zapffe