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#1

“Not negative or positive. Not true or false but rather -1, 0, and 1.”
― TJerald

tags: inspirational

0 likes

#2

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

tags: antinatalism

374 likes

#3

“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

519 likes

#4

“It is wrong to bear children out of need, wrong to use a child to alleviate loneliness, wrong to provide purpose in life by reproducing another copy of oneself. It is wrong also to seek immortality by spewing one's germ into the future as though sperm contains your consciousness!”
― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

tags: antinatalism, children, future, immortality, life, procreation

320 likes

#5

“It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.”
― David Benatar , Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

tags: antinatalism, childfree

188 likes

#6

“The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”
― Gustave Flaubert

tags: antinatalism, disgust, horror-of-life

126 likes

#7

“A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe, Essays og Epistler

tags: antinatalism, to-be-a-human-being

127 likes

#8

“He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that’s for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I’ll be bound – you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?”
― Gustave Flaubert, November

tags: antinatalism, parenthood

101 likes

#9

“Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

tags: antinatalism, conception, death, life

52 likes

#10

“Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

tags: antinatalism, child, kill, monster, parenting, parents, world

47 likes

#11

“A premature death does not only rob one of the countless instances where one would have experienced pleasure, it also saves one from the innumerable instances where one would have experienced pain.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: adage, adages, africa, african, antinatalism, antinatalist, antinatalists, anxiety, anxious, aphorism, aphorisms, axiom, axioms, casket, caskets, coffin, coffins, dead, death, deep, depress, depressing, dictum, dictums, dying, enjoy, enjoyment, epigram, epigrams, eulogies, eulogy, funeral, funerals, funny, gnome, gnomes, humor, humorous, humour, hurt, hurting, immortal, immortality, insightful, joy, lament, laments, made-me-think, make-you-think, maxim, maxims, mortal, mortality, pain, philosopher, pleasure, pleasures, premature, premature-death, premature-deaths, profound, proverb, proverbs, provoke-thought, quotation, quotations, quote, quote-of-the-day, quotes, rob, robbed, robber, robbers, robbing, satire, satirical, satirist, satirists, saying, sayings, south-africa, south-african, stress, suffer, suffering, thought-provoking, thoughtful, worried, worry, worrying

46 likes

#12

“A pregnant woman is a frightful object. A new-born child is loathsome. A deathbed rarely makes so horrible an impression as childbirth, that terrible symphony of screams and filth and blood.”
― Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

tags: antinatalism

33 likes

#13

“What foolishness it is to desire more life, after one has tasted
A bit of it and seen the world; for each day, after each endless day,
Piles up ever more misery into a mound. As for pleasures: once we
Have passed youth they vanish away, never again to be seen.
Death is the end of all.
Never to be born is the best thing. To have seen the daylight
And be swept instantly back into dark oblivion comes second.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

tags: antinatalism, emo, emotional-pain, nonexistence, philosophy, sophocles

21 likes

#14

“But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.”
― Paul Harding, Enon

tags: antinatalism, death, ethics, life, morality

19 likes

#15

“Those who have been pulled out of the calm tranquility of the void and trapped for life to a bodily existence have a single consolation: everything that lives, also dies. Sooner or later, the tragedy will be forever over. Every life is destined to return to the sweet nothing from which it emerged without its consent. This is our consolation.”
― Selim Güre, The Occult of the Unborn

tags: antinatalism, nihilism, nihilistic, pessimism, pessimistic, pessimistic-quotes, promortalism

17 likes

#16

“We celebrate life and mourn death. Yet life create death, and death create life. Every cradle is a grave. Why not celebrate death and mourn life?”
― Pelle Skogsberg

tags: antinatalism, promortalism

15 likes

#17

“Every time a man is begotten and born the clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I

tags: antinatalism, life, pessimism

19 likes

#18

“The argument that coming into existence is always a harm can be summarized as follows: Both good and bad things happen only to those who exist. However, there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things. The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things. The implication of this is that the avoidance of the bad by never existing is a real advantage over existence, whereas the loss of certain goods by not existing is not a real disadvantage over never existing.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

tags: antinatalism, existence, philosophy

13 likes

#19

“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?”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

tags: antinatalism, antinatalist, death, existence, peace, pessimism

10 likes

#20

“The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our being, we react like God, we are God.
It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

tags: antinatalism, antinatalist, narcissism, pessimism, philsophy

10 likes

#21

“And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 4:2-3”
― NRSV Bible (New Revised Standard Version)

tags: antinatalism, birth, death, ecclesiastes

2 likes

#22

“Refusing to have a child is the highest degree of rebellion, after suicide; one of the best uses of the mind; and the best gift to the planet.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: antinatalism, childfree, childless, children, natalism, overpopulation, parenthood, pessimism, pollution, suicide

10 likes

#23

“It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

tags: antinatalism, philosophy

7 likes

#24

“The reason I despised families with many children in particular was because each child they forced into the world tended to force even more, as did each subsequent generation, which resulted in an exponential growth of new human beings, none of whom asked to be born.

As the philosopher David Benatar has pointed out, assuming each couple has three children, their total descendants over ten generations amount to 88,572 new people. Now that’s a lot of unnecessary human beings! A lot of unnecessary pain and suffering! A lot of unnecessary British tourists!”
― Keijo Kangur, I Hate Traveling

tags: antinatalism, children

6 likes

#25

“Only to the degree that our moments afford us some contact with death do we have some chance to glimpse on what insanity all existence is based.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

tags: antinatalism, death, existence, life, pessimism, philosophy

5 likes

#26

“Every human relationship is an encounter between structurally worthless beings, anxiously searching to build up their values.”
― Julio Cabrera, Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation

tags: antinatalism, existential-nihilism, negative-ethics, pessimism

8 likes

#27

“Life is often the same kind of freedom: an unwanted one that makes people worse off than if they didn't have it. The fact that it is the basis for other freedoms does not demonstrate that it is a desirable thing to get.”
― Sarah Perry

tags: antinatalism, pessimism, philosophy

4 likes

#28

“Everyone dies of something. And we can't bury ourselves. This means that for every human being who has ever lived, someone must discover and dispose of the body. It is mistaken to attribute this harm only to suicides. It is part of our humanity that we - suicides and non-suicides alike - must inflict this harm on others. Once we have been given the dubious gift of life, we are destined to burden someone with the disposal of our dead body.”
― Sarah Perry, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide

tags: antinatalism

5 likes

#29

“Performing residual actions is to participate daily in small funeral ceremonies.”
― Julio Cabrera, Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics and Procreation

tags: antinatalism, existential-nihilism, negative-ethics, pessimism

4 likes

#30

“Part of what makes suicide seem devastating for those left behind is that it is framed as a tragic, preventable loss rather than the lucky escape of a miserable person.”
― Sarah Perry

tags: antinatalism

3 likes

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