#miser

Né avec une âme habituelle, j'en ai demandé une autre à la musique : ce fut le début de malheurs inespérés. ↗

— Emil Cioran

#music #music

Man cannot cherish his existence any longer than life holds out charms to him: when he is wrought upon by painful sensations, or drawn by contrary impulsions, his natural tendency is deranged; he is under the necessity to follow a new route; this conducts him to his end, which it even displays to him as the most desirable good. ↗

— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

#nature-of-man #nature

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#anonymity #born-again #clean-slate #extinction #family

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel? ↗

— Joseph Addison

#cruel #delights #father #make #man

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy. ↗

— Mikhail Bakunin

#church #few #forget #free #go

People love coming on television, even if they have to show their miseries. ↗

— Victoria Abril

#even #love #miseries #people #show

Consider then, O man! whether there can be anything more wretched and poor, more naked and miserable, than man when he dies, if he be not clothed with Christ's righteousness, and enriched in his God. ↗

— Johann Arndt

#christ #clothed #consider #dies #enriched

I've been divorced and I had to get back out there be single again and do some of that in the genuinely miserable state where you really do wonder what the hell is going on. And you feel like trying to have casual conversation with someone you don't know on the surface of the moon or something. ↗

— Hank Azaria

#back #been #casual #conversation #divorced

All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. ↗

— Henry Ward Beecher

#except #lawful #mankind #miseries #those

If we could only snap the fetters of the body that bind the feet of the soul, we shall experience a great joy. Then we shall not be miserable because of the body's sufferings. We shall become free. ↗

— Vinoba Bhave

#become #bind #body #could #experience