Pessimistic Passage of the Day...

[MTC]

&

"Take your cue not from the good old things but from the bad new ones."
- Brecht

[Cnev]

Quote Originally Posted by When_MP_Attacks

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. - Hemingway

Without a doubt, one of the most ignorant things ever written.

[ToALonelyPeace]

Quote Originally Posted by Cnev

Quote Originally Posted by When_MP_Attacks Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. - Hemingway Without a doubt, one of the most ignorant things ever written.

From a perspective, it's not ignorant. I think it depends on how you define intelligence in this case.

[Cnev]

Quote Originally Posted by ToALonelyPeace

Quote Originally Posted by Cnev Quote Originally Posted by When_MP_Attacks Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. - Hemingway Without a doubt, one of the most ignorant things ever written. From a perspective, it's not ignorant. I think it depends on how you define intelligence in this case.

If its only validity can be argued by subjective perspective, then why even bother making the overly-generalized, sweeping claim at all? I know what you're saying, but that pretty much exactly my point. I just don't think it's a very thoughtful quote, but I understand it. Relegating intelligence to almost wholly negative personalities just isn't indicative of reality. It's far more complicated, and diverse.

Anyway, I don't intend to derail this thread. Just because I've been re-reading Ms. O'Connor's collected works:

"He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly."

-The Life You Save May Be Your Own
Flannery O'Connor

I love "composed dissatisfaction" and I love meeting people with this attitude in real life.

EDIT-I just want to add that I understand the original quote is a subjective claim, but I keep seeing it one pop up among certain circles of internet nerds who use their anger/depression/inadequacy as a way to convince themselves that this "pessimistic" outlook is a direct result of some kind of gifted intelligence they posses over the masses. Bull####.

[Y]ou're what you are only for as long as the disguise lasts.

-- José Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night

[Piranesi]

William Weaver on encountering Alberto Moravia on his walks around Rome: "I would first, automatically, ask him how he was.

'Mi annoio,' he would usually reply, in his clipped, telegraphic way. Moravia sometimes seemed not to talk but to blurt. 'I'm bored. Mi annoio. Voglio morire.'

I never believed Moravia really wanted to die (and he would express the wish in an offhand tone, as if saying, 'I could use a cigarette'); but I did believe he was bored ..."

(Introduction to Boredom, NYRB, 1999).

[teguififthzeal]

“One of things that I do focus on at Facebook is making sure the culture is very friendly and that people hang out. So instead of having 20% of people’s time working on projects I make people hang out with each other.”

Mark Zuckerberg

[ToALonelyPeace]

But this laughter is the reason why the Tuscans invented science and the clear Tuscan drawing in their cool paintings: laughter means distance. Conversely: where laughter is absent, madness begins. Every time I've had a chance to observe an outbreak of psychosis or a first-rate clinical anxiety neurosis the signal has been given in the absence of humor --the moment one takes the world with complete seriousness one is potentially insane. The whole art of learning to live means holding fast to laughter; without laughter the world is a torture chamber, a dark place where dark things will happen to us, a horror show filled with bloody deeds of violence...

...For no conscious person can live without this ability to laugh at cripples, disease and suffering. To laugh at maltreated animals and children, to laugh at everything. Without the Florentine laughter one goes mad...Without laughter you sit fast in the pool of excrement, and you will slowly go into decomposition, into autolysis, you will fall apart, and yourself turn into living excrement...
All the great masters from Tuscany's ateliers took their sketchbooks along when they went to watch the public executions.

---Moment of Freedom, Jens Bjørneboe

[miguel1984]

"My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists."

--Jean Rostand

[Mr. Veech]

Quote Originally Posted by When_MP_Attacks

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. - Hemingway

I tend to agree, though there are exceptions. I think Aristotle would agree as well, assuming intelligence is an aspect of greatness. Of course, he also believed a number of absurd things.


"Great men are always of a melancholy temperament." - Aristotle