Jacob Graham > Quotes

“Pessimism is not a belief that things will get worse, either for the individual or the species—it is more profoundly a rejection of the idea that the universe has laws that can be grasped, that “it will all make sense in the end.”
― Jacob Graham, True Detective and Philosophy: A Deeper Kind of Darkness

“Given that bringing a life into existence always constitutes a harm (since that life will inevitably suffer at various points), whereas the absence of existence is never a harm, it follows that nonexistence is preferable to existence.”
― Jacob Graham, True Detective and Philosophy: A Deeper Kind of Darkness

“True monsters are not malevolent: rather, they are of the mindset that humanity is beneath consideration. Humanity is to them as insects are to us.”
― Jacob Graham

“... suicide robs a person of the highest wisdom regarding the apparent futility of life.”
― Jacob Graham, True Detective and Philosophy: A Deeper Kind of Darkness

“Pessimism, by contrast, prepares us for a world that is constantly changing and surprising us. It tells us to banish our expectations and the illusion that we are in control of our destiny. It allows us, in fact, to stop measuring our lives against some impossible plan that we fail to live up to.”
― Jacob Graham, True Detective and Philosophy: A Deeper Kind of Darkness

“The world repeats itself, but, whatever laws it might obey (if any), they are not such that the human mind can grasp or predict them. It is circular in the sense that it is not progressing (morally or scientifically) toward any goal but rather endlessly repeating an interaction of forces that we label good and evil in order to make sense of them. Not that the world cares about our labels. If our world can never be fully described by any law that humans can know, then we cannot be its masters, either intellectually or in practice.”
― Jacob Graham, True Detective and Philosophy: A Deeper Kind of Darkness