Anguish

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

I was much too far out all my life

Hell is other people.

Man is a useless passion.

Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Why should I let the toad work

Life is first boredom, then fear.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

I see a lily on thy brow

Oh, what can ail thee knight at arms

The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me.

Post equitem sedet atra Cura.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

… Life is too much like a pathless wood

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.

Tenants of the house,

We are the hollow men.