Robert Penn Warren Quotes

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

It's a fallen world. We eat and sacrifice in the process.

History is a conveyor belt of corpses because of Adam's sin.

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world.

You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief. Yes, you are dead. And I and my family and everyone, always, forever. All dead, like stones. But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.

Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.

The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture.

There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, nor vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment and then nothing.

Well, that’s that, then. We’re all going to die. Charming.

Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.

The thought that really crushes us is the thought of the futility of life of which death is the visible manifestation.

Our minds are affected by sin. Our hearts are affected by sin. Our wills are affected by sin. Our bodies are affected by sin.

Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway.

I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

For we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

This devil loves mankind because men are going to always make the choice that will send him into ascendancy. He's been winning the game for a long time.

When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.