LogFAQs > #956333432

KodyKeir posted...

well there is your problem, your optimistic outlook

Yep, it's pretty regrettable how much suffering such a "happy" disposition brings to the world without people even knowing it. Optimism is the cause of untold amounts of harm. My boy Schopenhaur has plenty of quotes pointing this out but two of my favorites are these from The World as Will and Representation.

"optimism, where it is not just the thoughtless talk of someone with only words in his flat head, strikes me as not only absurd, but even a truly wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of humanity."

"if we were to conduct the confirmed optimist through the hospitals, infirmaries, and surgical operating-rooms, through the prisons, torture-chambers, and slave-kennels, over battle-fields and places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it hides itself from the glance of cold curiosity, and, finally, allow him to glance into the starving dungeon of Ugolino, he, too, would understand at last the nature of this best of possible worlds"