Best Pessimism Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“It is the doubt of success that insures the fulfillment of that doubt.”

“I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who...prayed..with...unexpiated tears to 'dear,kind God!”

“Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.”

“If your ship goes down in the middle of the open water, you don't give up and sink. You tread water, clutch onto a spar, do 'something'.”

“People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.”

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

“Pessimism is not a prescription to escape the hornets’ nests of our anguish but a wrong tool to construct reliable steppingstones for the future. (''Happiness is blowing in the wind'')”

“If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?”

“All great conversions are born from the sudden revelation of life's meaninglessness. Nothing could be more moving or more impressive than this sudden apprehension of the void of existence.”

“There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.”

“Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.”

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

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre”

“Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.”

“Life is like butter - when things cool down it can be reshaped”

“Once is never. Twice is always.”

“If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.”

“For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible”

“We are good to others only because we think that that is, or will be, good for us.”

“To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them....”

“In my heart's most secret place,”

“See the moon? It hates us.”

“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".”

“The principle of caution, respecting the gravity of human suffering, weighs against procreating to the extent that it is unpredictable whether the person created will have a good life.”

“We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion...Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.”

“This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?”

“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.”

“The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.”

“There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable.”

“Life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie.”

“POZZO:”

“When things are at their blackest, I say to myself, 'Cheer up, things could be worse.' And sure enough, they get worse.”

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.”

“A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”