the euphoria of pessimism

For optimists, the most perplexing question is how one becomes a pessimist – if one is not born one.

Pessimism is misanthropy as an end, not a means – misanthropy without origin.

in writing, I feel a strange euphoria… there are so many ways to say nothing.

“What prevents a work from being completed becomes the work itself.”

If enthusiasm is the weakness of pessimists, then procrastination is the weakness of optimists. Stanisław Lec: “Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.”

Askesis. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Contrary to what many may think, pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of training.

We are the species that has sacrificed breath for speech.

Sometimes I’m asked if I’m a pessimist. I need to find a clever answer to this question. Or make up a good joke. But the truth is that I am a pessimist… except when writing about pessimism. I’ve managed to make pessimism a form of therapy.

Nietzsche once described the pessimist as a clever person who has ruined their stomach so as to complain about the food,