“Cecil Forrester was heir to many misfortunes, being handsome, rich, high-born, and clever.”
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)
Verdadeiramente há só uma desgraça: é não nascer.
Source: As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Ch. 117, p. 162.
“Cecil Forrester was heir to many misfortunes, being handsome, rich, high-born, and clever.”
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)
Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War
Book I, Chapter III
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I
“The only sin is the sin of being born.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) Irish novelist, playwright, and poet
As quoted in "Samuel Beckett Talks About Beckett" by John Gruen, in Vogue, (December 1969), p. 210
Comparable to "The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his 'soci malorum,' the sin of having been born. 'Pues el delito mayor / Del hombre es haber nacido.'" from his essay Proust, quoting Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream).
“Only by being prepared for your death can you ever truly live.”
Christopher Moore book A Dirty Job
Source: A Dirty Job
“There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.”
Albert Camus book Summer
Summer (1954), Return to Tipasa
Context: There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.
“No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.”
Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist
Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter
Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer