Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Medical tag
Suicide
Suicide, suicidal ideation, self-destruction.
Works
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
Chess (Schachnovelle, also translated as The Royal Game or Chess Story) is narrated by a passenger on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic, a stolid, almost illiterate son of a poor Danube boatman who was raised by a village priest, revealed an uncanny talent for chess, and now plays mechanically and greedily for money, showing no curiosity about anything else.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
Crime and Punishment follows Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished former student in St. Petersburg, as he murders the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta while testing an idea about extraordinary persons who may step over ordinary law.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Essays and Aphorisms is the title of the selection translated by R. J.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil was published in London in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, and its famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned sovereign whose body is made of hundreds of tiny subjects, holding a sword and a bishop's crozier above a peaceful town. The Introduction states the governing analogy: as art can make automata with springs for hearts and strings for nerves, so human art creates the commonwealth, an artificial man whose soul is sovereignty.
Lord Jim begins with an omniscient narrator describing Jim, a young English parson's son who went to sea after reading light holiday literature and dreams of heroic deeds. Injured by a falling spar, he recovers in an Eastern port and takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna, a decrepit steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim pilgrims across the Arabian Sea.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
Esquirol expands Pinelian alienism into a more elaborate clinical and institutional system. Mental Maladies surveys insanity as a family of disorders marked by disturbances of perception, judgment, passion, volition, and bodily function.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel made up of letters exchanged between two Persian noblemen travelling in Europe, Usbek and his younger companion Rica, and their friends, servants and wives back home in Isfahan. The letters run from 1711 to 1720, covering the last years of Louis XIV, the Regency and the collapse of John Law's financial system.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
The Second Treatise, subtitled 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government', is the constructive half of Locke's Two Treatises. The First Treatise demolishes Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which derived the absolute power of kings from Adam's fatherly dominion.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoyevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoyevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. ' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Passages
- Alone in Berlin, Part I
Frau Rosenthal, hounded and robbed, falls to her death from a window.
- Alone in Berlin, Part IV
Interrogation and imprisonment of the Quangels; cyanide capsules offered as a means of choosing death.
- Alone in Berlin, Part IV
Inspector Escherich, broken by what he has done, shoots himself.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four, §§68, 154, 156, 157
Memory yielding to pride; health versus pathology of thought; collective insanity; the thought of suicide as consolation through bad nights.
- Cannery Row, Early chapter (Palace Flophouse)
Horace Abbeville settles his debt with Lee Chong and shoots himself in the building that becomes the Palace Flophouse.
- City of God, Book 1
Augustine consoles Christians after Rome’s sack and discusses captivity, rape, shame and suicide.
- Complete Poems, 'Résumé' (Enough Rope)
A catalogue of methods of suicide and their disadvantages, ending in reluctant survival.
- Crime and Punishment, Confession and exile
Crime and Punishment gives this tag concrete force through this is a major psychiatric novel: fever, delirium, obsession, dissociation, alcoholism, suicide, trauma, and moral injury drive the action
- David Copperfield, Ch. 47
David and Mr Peggotty find Martha by the river, on the brink of drowning herself.
- Death of a Salesman, Act One, Linda's speech to her sons
Linda reveals Willy's deliberate car crashes and the rubber hose she found by the gas pipe.
- Death of a Salesman, Act Two, the firing and Charley's office
Willy is fired after decades and remarks that he is worth more dead than alive.
- Death of a Salesman, Act Two, final scenes and Requiem
Willy plans his death for the insurance; the funeral and Linda's inability to cry.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Philo on why the miserable remain alive: terrified, not bribed, to continue existing; the man of delicate temper as more sensitive and therefore more unhappy.
- East of Eden, Part Four
Kate, suffering from arthritis and fearing exposure, takes poison.
- Essays, Book II, Ch. III, 'A Custom of the Isle of Cea'
Survey of classical and biblical cases of voluntary death and the arguments for and against it, including unbearable pain as a justification.
- Essays and Aphorisms, Parerga II, 'On Suicide' (in the Hollingdale selection)
Rejection of religious and legal condemnation of suicide, mockery of clerical arguments, and the metaphysical claim that suicide fails to deny the will.
- Ethics, Part IV, Prop. XX, Note
No one refuses food or kills himself from the necessity of his own nature; Seneca's forced suicide and hidden external causes are discussed.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, First Section (examples of acting from duty)
The person who preserves life without loving it after hopeless sorrow, and the philanthropist whose own grief has extinguished sympathy.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (first example under the universal law of nature)
A man wearied of life asks whether suicide from self-love could be a universal law and concludes it could not.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section (formula of humanity, duties to oneself)
One may not mutilate, damage or kill oneself; Kant defers the question of amputating limbs to preserve life to a future ethics.
- Kokoro, Part Two
News of the Meiji emperor's death and General Nogi's suicide reaches the household.
- Kokoro, Part Three
K's suicide in his room and Sensei's discovery of the body and the note.
- Kokoro, Part Three (end)
Sensei's account of his long guilt and his resolve to die.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letters 70 and 77
Suicide and voluntary death are discussed as questions of freedom, endurance and circumstance.
- Leviathan, Part I, Ch. VIII
Madness as excessive passion; rage and melancholy; the man in Bedlam who claims to be God the Father; drunkenness; the Abdera fever epidemic and the hanging maidens of a Greek city.
- Lord Jim, Ch. 6
Captain Brierly, an assessor at the inquiry, jumps overboard soon after it ends, leaving careful arrangements.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 and 5, Scene 9 (Folio 5.7)
Lady Macbeth's death, later said to be by her own hand.
- Medea and Other Plays, Heracles, madness episode
In a related Euripidean tragedy, Heracles kills his family under divinely imposed madness and awakens to horror.
- Mental Maladies, Lypemania and monomania
The diagnostic chapters track partial delusions, fixed ideas, fear, sorrow, and suicidal danger under now-historical labels.
- My Ántonia, Book I (c. Ch. 14–16)
Mr Shimerda shoots himself in the barn; the inquest, the debate over burial and the crossroads grave.
- My Ántonia, Book II
Ántonia tells of a tramp who jumped into a threshing machine.
- Persian Letters, Letter 76 (numbering varies by edition)
Usbek argues that laws against suicide are unjust, since a man oppressed by misery should be free to leave a society that no longer benefits him.
- Persian Letters, Final letter (Letter 161 in the 1758 numbering)
Roxane writes to Usbek after taking poison, declaring her deception and her inner freedom.
- Ruth, Ch. 8
Abandoned, Ruth runs toward a pool to drown herself and is stopped by Benson.
- Second Treatise of Government, Ch. II, §6
The law of nature forbids harming anyone in life, health, liberty or possessions; no one has liberty to destroy himself.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', final entries
He sets fire to his house to destroy the Horla and resolves that he must kill himself.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'By the River'
Contemplating drowning, Siddhartha hears Om, falls into a long sleep and wakes renewed.
- Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 64, Art. 5 (not in stored text)
Whether it is lawful to kill oneself: Aquinas's three arguments from natural self-love, the community and God's dominion over life.
- The Aeneid, Book 4
Dido’s passion, abandonment, curse and suicide dominate the Carthage episode.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Demosthenes 29–30
Demosthenes takes poison concealed in his pen to avoid capture by Macedonian agents.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 4, Memb. 1
Prognostics of melancholy, including Burton's discussion of suicide among melancholics and the question of how such deaths should be judged.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 3, Sect. 4, Memb. 2, Subs. 2–6
Religious despair: definitions, causes in the devil, melancholy and terrifying preaching, symptoms of fear and anxiety, prognosis toward violent death, and cure by physic and good counsel.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 15, Seneca’s death
Seneca’s forced suicide is narrated as philosophical performance and political coercion.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Murder and trial
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Dagon'
Narrator's morphine dependence, terror and suicidal resolve after his vision of the sea creature.
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 'Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family'
A family history of madness and 'taint' culminating in Arthur Jermyn's self-immolation.
- The Civil War, Book II.41–42
Curio's exhausted and wounded men cannot break out; Curio refuses flight and fights until killed.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters (before 'Number 34 and Number 27')
Dantès, despairing in solitary confinement, resolves to die by refusing food.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Final chapters
Madame de Villefort poisons herself and her son; Villefort loses his reason.
- The Jewish War, Book 3, siege of Jotapata
Roman siege engines, wounds, exhaustion, fear and Josephus' survival after a collective death pact make the campaign a study in injury and combat psychology.
- The Jewish War, Book 7, Masada
The Masada episode presents collective suicide as a response to enslavement and defeat, requiring careful historical and ethical reading.
- The Koran, Sura 4:29
Command not to kill yourselves (or each other), interpreted as forbidding suicide.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 60e–62c
Socrates' recurring dream telling him to make music, and his argument that suicide is wrong until the god sends necessity.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 3–4
Her jump from the window holding an icon, Lukerya's account, and the narrator's anguish over the body.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Big Blonde
Hazel Morse's party persona, drinking, depressive decline and suicide attempt make the story central for alcoholism and gendered despair.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Selected poems on suicide and heartbreak
Several short lyrics use comic form to stage suicidal thought, romantic despair and the social performance of toughness.
- The Portable Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury selections
Benjy's sensory narrative, Caddy's absence and Quentin's breakdown foreground disability, grief, time disturbance and suicidal despair.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, A
Despair as a sickness one cannot die of: the torment of wishing to die and being unable to, of the self wanting to be rid of itself.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Part One, C (despair of weakness and of defiance)
Despair over the earthly and over oneself, inclosing reserve that hides despair from others, the risk of suicide in the inclosed person, and demonic defiance.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, recognition
Jocasta dies by hanging and Oedipus blinds himself after discovering his birth and crimes.
- The Theban Plays, Antigone, final messenger speech
Antigone, Haemon and Eurydice die by suicide after Creon’s delayed repentance.
- The Waves, Rhoda's soliloquies
Rhoda repeatedly experiences terror, unreality and separation from ordinary social identity.
- The World as Will and Representation, Fourth Book, §§68–69
Asceticism, fasting and self-mortification; suicide as affirmation of the will; voluntary starvation by ascetics, with cases reported in contemporary sources.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse XXI: Voluntary Death
Praise of dying 'at the right time' and scorn for lingering decline; important for the history of arguments about suicide and end-of-life choice.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (whether happiness is attainable)
Tranquillity and excitement as the two constituents of a satisfied life; the 'need of excitement' as a disease; selfishness and lack of mental cultivation as the main causes of an unsatisfying life; a passing reference to Novalis's recommendation of suicide.
Quotes
“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night”
“You might as well live.”
“We are terrified, not bribed to the continuance of our existence”
“if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life; if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it- not from inclination or fear, but from duty- then his maxim has a moral worth”
“A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life”
“But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence”
“observe this short precept, give not way to solitariness and idleness. Be not solitary, be not idle”
“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived”
Frequently cited
“What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to _be_, to be _nothing._ The second best for you, however, is soon to die”
“I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.”
“But Curio declared that he would never more appear in Caesar's sight, after losing the army which had been committed by Caesar to his charge, and accordingly fought till he was killed”
“To be unable to bear privation for a short time is disgraceful cowardice, not true valour. Those who voluntarily offer themselves to death are more easily found than those who would calmly endure distress”
“Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phenomenon of strong assertion of will”
“It is starvation, voluntarily chosen on the ground of extreme asceticism”
“Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra”