• The former fact also explains the restlessness of those who have nothing to do, and their aimless travelling. What drives them from country to country is the same boredom which at home drives them together into such crowds and heaps it is funny to see.

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Classics)

  • When you consider how great and how immediate is the problem of existence, this ambiguous, tormented, fleeting, dreamlike existence–so great and so immediate that as soon as you are aware of it it overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when you then see how men, with a few rare exceptions, have no clear awareness of this problem, indeed seem not to be conscious of it at all, but concern themselves with anything rather than with this problem and live on taking thought only for the day and for the hardly longer span of their own individual future, either expressly refusing to consider this problem or contenting themselves with some system of popular metaphysics;

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Classics)

  • As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something–in which case distance and difficulties make our goal look as if it would satisfy us (an illusion which fades when we reach it)

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Classics)

  • I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.

    Submission: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • Ultimately, love resolves all problems.

    Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto: Rester vivant (To Stay Alive)

  • Your unceasing working over of your obsessions will end up transforming you into a pathetic wreck, consumed by anguish and devastated by apathy.

    Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto: Rester vivant (To Stay Alive)

  • That said, survival is extremely difficult. One could consider adopting what could be called Pessoa’s strategy: find a little job, publish nothing, and await death peacefully. In practice, one would be going forward to meet significant difficulties: the feeling that one is wasting one’s time, that one is not in one’s place, that one is not being esteemed at one’s true value. . . All this would rapidly become unbearable.

    Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto: Rester vivant (To Stay Alive)

  • Develop in yourself a profound resentment toward life. This resentment is necessary for any veritable artistic creation.

    Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto: Rester vivant (To Stay Alive)

  • I left after breakfast the next day, under a brilliant Sunday sun, which contrasted with my growing sadness.

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq

  • I came into contact (the receptionist at the Hôtel Mercure, the waiters at the café O’Jules, the girl on the till at Carrefour City) had asked about my mood, I would have been inclined to call it ‘sad’, but it was a peaceful, stable sadness, not susceptible to increase or decrease; a sadness, in short, that to all intents and purposes appeared definitive. But I wasn’t falling into that trap; I knew that life might still have plenty of surprises, either atrocious or delightful, in store for me.

    Serotonin: A Novel
    Michel Houellebecq