For optimists, the most perplexing question is how one becomes a pessimist – if one is not born one. For the pessimist, the question is how each person, by virtue of being born, is not already a pessimist.

The most devastating thing about suffering is that it is relative. There is always someone who hurts more, someone who hurts less.

What is repulsive about children – all children – is not that they are not yet adults, but that they are already adults – whining, self-absorbed, demanding attention, unable to care for themselves, throwing tantrums when things don’t go their way. Far from what we tell ourselves, children are the most concise expressions of humanity. At least children are unaware of this.

It is often said that the more spiritual a person becomes, the more unassuming they are. Eventually, they vanish entirely.

One who has ceased being irritated by others, but who remains a misanthrope.

The indifference of the everyday gets the better of us all.

For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.

It seems to have no motive, no vendetta, no program of action, other than simply that of “being ooze.

When solutions produce problems, when thought flounders in the absence of order, unity, and purpose, when healthy skepticism turns into pathological sarcasm – this is usually when pessimism enters the fray.

Happiness is the feeling you have just before something goes wrong.