"Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be
sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and
necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he
obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but
abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no
real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness
of life? If life-the craving for which is the very essence of our being-were
possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as
boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should
want for nothing."