I disapprove a birth!

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!
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If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all. Cioran
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Then Māra the Evil One approached the bhikkhunī Cālā and said to her: “What don’t you approve of, bhikkhunī?” “I don’t approve of birth, friend.”

“Why don’t you approve of birth?
Once born, one enjoys sensual pleasures.
Who now has persuaded you of this:
‘Bhikkhunī, don’t approve of birth’?”

[The bhikkhunī Cālā:]

“For one who is born there is death;
Once born, one encounters sufferings—
Bondage, murder, affliction—
Hence one shouldn’t approve of birth.

“The Buddha has taught the Dhamma,
The transcendence of birth;
For the abandoning of all suffering
He has settled me in the truth.

“As to those beings who fare amidst form,
And those who abide in the formless—
Not having understood cessation,
They come again to renewed existence.”
SN 5: 6

[Petrarch: “A thousand pleasures are not worth one torment”]. So how can one pleasure be worth a thousand torments? And yet such is life. This line contains within it a death sentence on human life, and on those who agree to live, in other words on all living beings. Leopardi

Are we born, then, only to feel what happiness it would be had we not been born? Leopardi↓

Desiring life, no matter what the circumstances, and in the full extent of that desire, is in the end simply desiring unhappiness; desiring to live is the same as desiring to be unhappy.

It is fitting to weep for the newborn who begins now to furrow the sea of so many evils, and with joy should be followed to the grave he who has departed from the travails of life. Euripides

The greatest of misfortunes is to be born, the greatest happiness to die. Sophocles

Not merely now, but long ago, as Crantor says, the lot of man has been bewailed by many wise men, who have felt that life is a punishment and that for man to be born at all is the greatest calamity. Aristotle says that Silenus when he was captured declared this to Midas. Plutarch

Misery is to be born, not to die. All depends how you look at it. (What was born, must die, what never was born, cannot die.) NM

Birth and chain are synonyms. To see the light of day, to see shackles … Cioran ↓
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The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. ... It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.

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In the “Gospel According to the Egyptians,” Jesus proclaims: “Men will be the victims of death so long as women give birth.” And he specifies: “I am come to destroy the works of woman.”
When we frequent the extreme truths of the Gnostics, we should like to go, if possible, still further, to say something never said, which petrifies or pulverizes history, something out of a cosmic Neronianism, out of a madness on the scale of matter.
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Three in the morning, I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.
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Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else.
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When we have worn out the interest we once took in death, when we realize we have nothing more to gain from it, we fall back on birth, we turn to a much more inexhaustible abyss.
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“Ever since I was born”—that since has a resonance so dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable.
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Not yet to have digested the affront of being born.
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Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past.
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In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left—ignorant how to react—with a foolish grin.
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In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of “the abyss of birth.” An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.
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When you meditate all day on the inopportuneness of birth, everything you plan and everything you perform seems pathetic, futile....
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It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive.
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The emphasis on birth is no more than the craving for the insoluble carried to the point of insanity.
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An idea, a being, anything which becomes incarnate loses identity, turns grotesque. Frustration of all achievement. Never quit the possible, wallow in eternal trifling, forget to be born.
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If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been tetter to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?
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With the passage of time, I am convinced that my first years were a paradise. But I am undoubtedly mistaken. If there was ever a paradise, I must look for it earlier than all my years.
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That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated.
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I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs—between a false promise and the end of all promises.
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According to the Cabbala, God created souls at the beginning, and they were all before him in the form they would later take in their incarnation. Each soul, when its time has come, receives the order to join the body destined for it, but each to no avail implores its Creator to spare it this bondage and this corruption.
The more I think of what could not have failed to happen when my own soul’s turn came, the more I realize that if there was one soul which more than the rest must have resisted incarnation, it was mine.
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“Life seems good only to the madman,” observed Hegesias, a Cyrcnaic philosopher, some twenty-three centuries ago. These are almost the only words of his we have…. Of all oeuvres to reinvent, his comes first on my list.
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Kandinsky maintains that yellow is the color of life. . . . Now we know why this hue so hurts the eyes.
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Anyone possessing a body is entitled to be called a reprobate. If he is afflicted with a “soul” as well, there is no anathema to which he cannot lay claim.
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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. ...
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What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
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To die is to prove one knows one’s own interest.
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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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If, at the moment of our birth, we were as conscious as we are at the end of adolescence, it is more than likely that at the age of five suicide would be a habitual phenomenon or even a question of honor. But we wake too late: we have against us the years nourished solely by the presence of the instincts, which can be only stupefied by the conclusions to which our meditations and our disappointments lead.