Background Image

...

Think Of God And Not Religion, Of Ecstasy And Not Mysticism. The Difference Between The Theoretician Of Faith And The Believer Is As Great As Between The Psychiatrist And The Psychotic.

-Emile M. Cioran

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Think Of God And

Emile M. Cioran

...

Think Of God And Not Religion, Of Ecstasy And Not Mysticism. The Difference Between The Theoretician Of Faith And The Believer Is As Great As Between The Psychiatrist And The Psychotic.

Views: 9

Topic

More From Emile M. Cioran

Our Works, Whatever They May Be, Derive From Our Incapacity To Kill Or To Kill Ourselves.

The Universal View Melts Things Into A Blur.

Between Ennui And Ecstasy Unwinds Our Whole Experience Of Time.

History Proves Nothing Because It Contains Everything.

Every Thought Should Recall The Ruin Of A Smile.

Is It Possible That Existence Is Our Exile And Nothingness Our Home?

What Necessity Impels A Writer Who Has Produced Fifty Books To Write Still One More? Why This Proliferation, This Fear Of Being Forgotten, This Debased Coquetry?

The Importance Of Insomnia Is So Colossal That I Am Tempted To Define Man As The Animal Who Cannot Sleep. Why Call Him A Rational Animal When Other Animals Are Equally Reasonable? But There Is Not Another Animal In The Entire Creation That Wants To Sleep Yet Cannot.

To Exist Is A Habit I Do Not Despair Of Acquiring.

What Pride To Discover That Nothing Belongs To You - What A Revelation.

We Inhabit A Language Rather Than A Country.

For You Who No Longer Possess It, Freedom Is Everything, For Us Who Do, It Is Merely An Illusion.

Utopia Is A Mixture Of Childish Rationalism And Secularized Angelism.

To Act Is To Anchor In An Imminent Future, So Imminent It Becomes Almost Tangible; To Act Is To Feel You Are Consubstantial With That Future.

Show Me One Thing Here On Earth Which Has Begun Well And Not Ended Badly. The Proudest Palpitations Are Engulfed In A Sewer, Where They Cease Throbbing, As Though Having Reached Their Natural Term: This Downfall Constitutes The Heart's Drama And The Negative Meaning Of History.

Anyone Can Escape Into Sleep, We Are All Geniuses When We Dream, The Butcher's The Poet's Equal There.

To Devastate By Language, To Blow Up The Word And With It The World.

The Fanatic Is Incorruptible: If He Kills For An Idea, He Can Just As Well Get Himself Killed For One; In Either Case, Tyrant Or Martyr, He Is A Monster.

Time Is Heavy Sometimes; Imagine How Heavy Eternity Must Be.

No One Can Do Without Some Semblance Of Immortality, And Even Less Will They Deny Themselves The Right To Seek It Out In The Form Of This Or That Reputation, Starting With The Literary... Since Death Has Come To Be Accepted By All As The Absolute End, Everyone Writes.

Suffering Makes You Live Time In Detail, Moment After Moment. Which Is To Say That It Exists For You: Over The Others, The Ones Who Don't Suffer, Time Flows, So That They Don't Live In Time, In Fact They Never Have.

Tyranny Destroys Or Strengthens The Individual; Freedom Enervates Him, Until He Becomes No More Than A Puppet. Man Has More Chances Of Saving Himself By Hell Than By Paradise.

You Cannot Protect Your Solitude If You Cannot Make Yourself Odious.

As Long As One Believes In Philosophy, One Is Healthy; Sickness Begins When One Starts To Think.

In A Republic, That Paradise Of Debility, The Politician Is A Petty Tyrant Who Obeys The Laws.

Life Creates Itself In Delirium And Is Undone In Ennui.

Delirium Tremens

The Fear Of Your Own Solitude, Of Its Vast Surface And Its Infinity… Remorse Is The Voice Of Solitude. And What Does This Whispering Voice Say? Everything In Us That Is Not Human Anymore.

Pursued By Our Origins... We All Are.

One Does Not Inhabit A Country; One Inhabits A Language. That Is Our Country, Our Fatherland - And No Other.

History Is Nothing But A Procession Of False Absolutes, A Series Of Temples Raised To Pretexts, A Degradation Of The Mind Before The Improbable.

Normal People Have Nothing To Forget.

For A Long Time—always, In Fact—i Have Known That Life Here On Earth Is Not What I Needed And That I Wasn’t Able To Deal With It; For This Reason And For This Reason Alone, I Have Acquired A Touch Of Spiritual Pride, So That My Existence Seems To Me The Degradation And The Erosion Of A Psalm.

At This Very Moment, I Am Suffering—as We Say In French, J’ai Mal. This Event, Crucial For Me, Is Nonexistent, Even Inconceivable For Anyone Else, For Everyone Else. Except For God, If That Word Can Have A Meaning.

If You're Unlucky Enough Not To Have Alcoholic Parents, It Takes You A Whole Lifetime Of Intoxication To Overcome The Dead Weight Of Their Virtues.

Man Started Out On The Wrong Foot. The Misadventure In Paradise Was The First Consequence. The Rest Had To Follow.

Melancholy: An Appetite No Misery Satisfies.

Whenever I Happen To Be In A City Of Any Size, I Marvel That Riots Do Not Break Out Everyday: Massacres, Unspeakable Carnage, A Doomsday Chaos. How Can So Many Human Beings Coexist In A Space So Confined Without Hating Each Other To Death?

If A Man Has Not, By The Time He Is Thirty, Yielded To The Fascination Of Every Form Of Extremism—i Don't Know Whether He Is To Be Admired Or Scorned, Regarded As A Saint Or A Corpse.

Write Books Only If You Are Going To Say In Them The Things You Would Never Dare Confide To Anyone.

Philosophy Is A Corrective Against Sadness. Yet There Still Are People Who Believe In The Profundity Of Philosophy!

We Must Learn How To Explode! Any Disease Is Healthier Than The One Provoked By A Hoarded Rage.

Alone, Even Doing Nothing, You Do Not Waste Your Time. You Do, Almost Always, In Company. No Encounter With Yourself Can Be Altogether Sterile: Something Necessarily Emerges, Even If Only The Hope Of Some Day Meeting Yourself Again.

We Cannot Consent To Be Judged By Someone Who Has Suffered Less Than Ourselves. And Since Each Of Us Regards Himself As An Unrecognized Job.

We Are Afraid Of The Enormity Of The Possible.

Hungarian Language — Savage It May Be But Of A Beauty That Has Nothing Human About It, With Sonorities Of Another Universe, Powerful And Corrosive, Appropriate To Prayer, To Groans And To Tears, Risen Out Of Hell To Perpetuate Its Accent And Its Aura…words Of Nectar And Cyanide.

Each Of Us Must Pay For The Slightest Damage He Inflicts Upon A Universe Created For Indifference And Stagnation, Sooner Or Later, He Will Regret Not Having Left It Intact.

The Reaction Against Your Own Thought In Itself Lends Life To Thought. How This Reaction Is Born Is Hard To Describe, Because It Identifies With The Very Rare Intellectual Tragedies. The Tension, The Degree And Level Of Intensity Of A Thought Proceeds From Its Internal Antinomies, Which In Turn Are Derived From The Unsolvable Contradictions Of A Soul. Thought Cannot Solve The Contradictions Of The Soul. As Far As Linear Thinking Is Concerned, Thoughts Mirror Themselves In Other Thoughts, Instead Of Mirroring A Destiny.

I Do Not Want To See Bp Nickel And Diming These Businesses That Are Having A Tough Time.

After Having Struggled Madly To Solve All Problems, After Having Suffered On The Heights Of Despair, In The Supreme Hour Of Revelation, You Will Find That The Only Answer, The Only Reality, Is Silence.

The History Of Ideas Is The History Of The Grudges Of Solitary Men.

Illusion Begets And Sustains The World; We Do Not Destroy One Without Destroying The Other. Which Is What I Do Every Day. An Apparently Ineffectual Operation, Since I Must Begin All Over Again The Next Day.

An Individual Dies ... When, Instead Of Taking Risks And Hurling Himself Toward Being, He Cowers Within, And Takes Refuge There.

I Have Always Struggled, With The Sole Intention Of Ceasing To Struggle. Result: Zero.

I Would Like To Explode, Flow, Crumble Into Dust, And My Disintegration Would Be My Masterpiece.

Anyone Who Speaks In The Name Of Others Is Always An Impostor.

What Is That One Crucifixion Compared To The Daily Kind Any Insomniac Endures?

Basis Of Society: Anonymous Sweat.

A Decadent Civilization Compromises With Its Disease, Cherishes The Virus Infecting It, Loses Its Self-respect.

The More Intense A Spiritual Leader's Appetite For Power, The More He Is Concerned To Limit It To Others.

We Are All Geniuses When We Dream.

How Good Would It Be If One Could Die By Throwing Oneself Into An Infinite Void.

Freedom Can Be Manifested Only In The Void Of Beliefs, In The Absence Of Axioms, And Only Where The Laws Have No More Authority Than A Hypothesis.

A Civilization Is Destroyed Only When Its Gods Are Destroyed.

What Every Man Who Loves His Country Hopes For In His Inmost Heart: The Suppression Of Half His Compatriots.

The Multiplication Of Our Kind Borders On The Obscene; The Duty To Love Them, On The Preposterous.

When People Come To Me Saying They Want To Kill Themselves, I Tell Them, "what’s Your Rush? You Can Kill Yourself Any Time You Like. So Calm Down. Suicide Is A Positive Act." And They Do Calm Down.

What Strangely Enchanted Tunes Gush Forth During Those Sleepless Nights!

We Understand God By Everything In Ourselves That Is Fragmentary, Incomplete, And Inopportune.

How Important Can It Be That I Suffer And Think? My Presence In This World Will Disturb A Few Tranquil Lives And Will Unsettle The Unconscious And Pleasant Naiveté Of Others. Although I Feel That My Tragedy Is The Greatest In History - Greater Than The Fall Of Empires - I Am Nevertheless Aware Of My Total Insignificance. I Am Absolutely Persuaded That I Am Nothing In This Universe; Yet I Feel That Mine Is The Only Real Existence.

As The Years Pass, The Number Of Those We Can Communicate With Diminishes. When There Is No Longer Anyone To Talk To, At Last We Will Be As We Were Before Stooping To A Name.

I Have No Nationality - The Best Possible Status For An Intellectual.

Think Of God And Not Religion, Of Ecstasy And Not Mysticism. The Difference Between The Theoretician Of Faith And The Believer Is As Great As Between The Psychiatrist And The Psychotic.

It Is Enough For Me To Hear Someone Talk Sincerely About Ideals, About The Future, About Philosophy, To Hear Him Say “we" With A Certain Inflection Of Assurance, To Hear Him Invoke "others" And Regard Himself As Their Interpreter - For Me To Consider Him My Enemy.

What Are You Waiting For In Order To Give Up?

To Possess A High Degree Of Consciousness, To Be Always Aware Of Yourself In Relation To The World, To Live In The Permanent Tension Of Knowledge, Means To Be Lost For Life.

To Venture Upon An Undertaking Of Any Kind, Even The Most Insignificant, Is To Sacrifice To Envy.

Who Rebels? Who Rises In Arms? Rarely The Slave, But Almost Always The Oppressor Turned Slave.

Society: An Inferno Of Saviors!

Skepticism Is The Sadism Of Embittered Souls.

To Act Is To Anchor In The Imminent Future.

Tragic Paradox Of Freedom: The Mediocre Men Who Alone Make Its Exercise Possible Cannot Guarantee Its Duration.

To Exist Is Equivalent To An Act Of Faith, A Protest Against The Truth, An Interminable Prayer. As Soon As They Consent To Live, The Unbeliever And The Man Of Faith Are Fundamentally The Same, Since Both Have Made The Only Decision That Defines A Being.

There Was A Time When Time Did Not Yet Exist. … The Rejection Of Birth Is Nothing But The Nostalgia For This Time Before Time.

There Is No Other World. Nor Even This One. What, Then, Is There? The Inner Smile Provoked In Us By The Patent Nonexistence Of Both.

A Distant Enemy Is Always Preferable To One At The Gate.

Afflicted With Existence, Each Man Endures Like An Animal The Consequences Which Proceed From It. Thus, In A World Where Everything Is Detestable, Hatred Becomes Huger Than The World And, Having Transcended Its Object, Cancels Itself Out.

A Sensation Must Have Fallen Very Low To Deign To Turn Into An Idea.

We Cannot Be Normal And Alive At The Same Time.

To Live... In Any Sense Of The Word... Is To Reject Others; To Accept Them, One Must Renounce, Do Oneself Violence.

Transmitting One's Flaws [through Procreation] To Someone Else Is A Crime. I Could Never Consent To Give Life To Someone Who Would Inherent My Ailments.

Not One Moment When I Have Not Been Conscious Of Being Outside Paradise.

How Easy It Is To Be "deep": All You Have To Do Is Let Yourself Sink Into Your Own Flaws.

What Would Be Left Of Our Tragedies If An Insect Were To Present Us His?

Truths Begin By A Conflict With The Police - And End By Calling Them In.

Beware Of Thinkers Whose Minds Function Only When They Are Fueled By A Quotation.

Tolerance - The Function Of An Extinguished Ardor - Tolerance Cannot Seduce The Young.

All Great Ideas Should Be Followed By An Exclamation Mark - A Warning Signal Similar To The Skull And Crossbones Drawn On High-voltage Transformers.

Exclamation Marks

So Long As Man Is Protected By Madness - He Functions - And Flourishes.

By Virtue Of Depression, We Recall Those Misdeeds We Buried In The Depths Of Our Memory. Depression Exhumes Our Shames.

What Is Pity But The Vice Of Kindness.

No One Recovers From The Disease Of Being Born, A Deadly Wound If There Ever Was One.

The Only Free Mind Is One That, Pure Of All Intimacy With Beings Or Objects, Plies Its Own Vacuity.

Negation Is The Mind's First Freedom, Yet A Negative Habit Is Fruitful Only So Long As We Exert Ourselves To Overcome It, Adapt It To Our Needs; Once Acquired It Can Imprison Us.

My Mission Is To Suffer For All Those Who Suffer Without Knowing It. I Must Pay For Them, Expiate Their Unconsciousness, Their Luck To Be Ignorant Of How Unhappy They Are.

The Only Way Of Enduring One Disaster After The Next Is To Love The Very Idea Of Disaster: If We Succeed, There Are No Further Surprises, We Are Superior To Whatever Occurs, We Are Invincible Victims.

To Accomplish Nothing And Die Of The Strain

Accomplish Nothing

Vague A L'ame - Melancholy Yearning For The End Of The World.

Death Makes No Sense Except To People Who Have Passionately Loved Life. How Can One Die Without Having Something To Part From? Detachment Is A Negation Of Both Life And Death. Whoever Has Overcome His Fear Of Death Has Also Triumphed Over Life. For Life Is Nothing But Another Word For This Fear.

I Have All The Defects Of Other People Yet Everything They Do Seems To Me Inconceivable.

Wherever We Go, We Come Up Against The Human, A Repulsive Ubiquity Before Which We Fall Into Stupor And Revolt, A Perplexity On Fire.

Once You See That Everything Is Unreal, You Can't See Why You Should Bother To Prove It.

Intelligence Flourishes Only In The Ages When Belief Withers.

This Very Second Has Vanished Forever, Lost In The Anonymous Mass Of The Irrevocable. It Will Never Return. I Suffer From This And I Do Not. Everything Is Unique - And Insignificant.

Knowledge, Having Irritated And Stimulated Our Appetite For Power, Will Lead Us Inexorably To Our Ruin.

Crime In Full Glory Consolidates Authority By The Sacred Fear It Inspires.

A Golden Rule: To Leave An Incomplete Image Of Oneself.

We Dread The Future Only When We Are Not Sure We Can Kill Ourselves When We Want To.

Utopia Is The Grotesque En Rose, The Need To Associate Happiness - That Is, The Improbable - With Becoming, And To Coerce An Optimistic, Aerial Vision To The Point Where It Rejoins Its Own Source: The Very Cynicism It Sought To Combat. In Short, A Monstrous Fantasy.

My Mission Is To Kill Time, And Time's To Kill Me In Its Turn. How Comfortable One Is Among Murderers.

Glory - Once Achieved, What Is It Worth?

Where Are My Sensations? They Have Melted Into... Me, And What Is This Me, This Self, But The Sum Of These Evaporated Sensations?

The Obsession With Suicide Is Characteristic Of The Man Who Can Neither Live Nor Die, And Whose Attention Never Swerves From This Double Impossibility.

What Can Be Said, Lacks Reality. Only What Fails To Make Its Way Into Words Exists And Counts.

Losing Love Is So Rich A Philosophical Ordeal That It Makes A Hairdresser Into A Rival Of Socrates.

The Task Of The Solitary Man Is To Be Even More Solitary.

I Am The Beast With A Contorted Grin, Contracting Down To Illusion And Dilating Toward Infinity, Both Growing And Dying, Delightfully Suspended Between Hope For Nothing And Despair Of Everything, Brought Up Among Perfumes And Poisons, Consumed With Love And Hatred, Killed By Lights And Shadows. My Symbol Is Death Of Light And The Flame Of Death. Sparks Die In Me Only To Be Reborn As Thunder And Lightning. Darkness Itself Glows In Me.

We Define Only Out Of Despair, We Must Have A Formula... To Give A Facade Tot He Void.

To Claim You Are More Detached, More Alien To Everything Than Anyone, And To Be Merely A Fanatic Of Indifference!

We Are Born To Exist, Not To Know, To Be, Not To Assert Ourselves.

The Fact That Life Has No Meaning Is A Reason To Live - Moreover, The Only One.

Meaning Of Life

To Think Is To Take A Cunning Revenge In Which We Camouflage Our Baseness And Conceal Our Lower Instincts.

I Have Decided Not To Oppose Anyone Ever Again, Since I Have Noticed That I Always End By Resembling My Latest Enemy.

Try To Be Free: You Will Die Of Hunger.

Reality Is A Creation Of Our Excesses.

To Foreswear Vengeance Is To Chain Oneself To Forgiveness, To Flounder In Pardon, To Be Tainted By The Hatred Smothered Within.

Sometimes I Wish I Were A Cannibal – Less For The Pleasure Of Eating Someone Than For The Pleasure Of Vomiting Him.

To Have Committed Every Crime But That Of Being A Father.

Humanity Adores Only Those Who Cause It To Perish.

Read Day And Night, Devour Books - These Sleeping Pills - Not To Know But To Forget! Through Books You Can Retrace Your Way Back To The Origins Of Spleen, Discarding History And Its Illusions.

A Garbled Quotation Is Equivalent To A Betrayal, An Insult, A Prejudice.

Shame On The Man Who Goes To His Grave Escorted By The Miserable Hopes That Have Kept Him Alive.

Doubt Works Deep Within You Like A Disease Or, Even More Effectively, Like A Faith.

When We Cannot Be Delivered From Ourselves, We Delight In Devouring Ourselves.

What A Pity That 'nothingness' Has Been Devalued By An Abuse Of It Made By Philosophers Unworthy Of It!

True Moral Elegance Consists In The Art Of Disguising One's Victories As Defeats.

Our First Intuitions Are The True Ones.

If We Had The Courage To Confront The Doubts We Timidly Conceive About Ourselves, None Of Us Would Utter An 'i' Without Shame.

What Does The Future, That Half Of Time, Matter To The Man Who Is Infatuated With Eternity?

Life Is Possible Only By The Deficiencies Of Our Imagination And Memory.

I'm Simply An Accident. Why Take It All So Seriously?

The Wise Man, The Sage, Is Hostile To The New. Disabused, He Abdicates: That Is His Form Of Protest.

Only One Thing Matters: Learning To Be The Loser.

Ideas Come As You Walk, Nietzsche Said. Walking Dissipates Thoughts, Shankara Taught.

What To Think Of Other People? I Ask Myself This Question Each Time I Make A New Acquaintance. So Strange Does It Seem To Me That We Exist, And That We Consent To Exist.

Democracy: A Festival Of Mediocrity.

"the Holy Ghost," Luther Instructs Us, "is Not A Skeptic." Not Everyone Can Be, And That Is Really Too Bad.

Life Is Merely A Fracas On An Unmapped Terrain, And The Universe A Geometry Stricken With Epilepsy.

To Live Entirely Without A Goal! I Have Glimpsed This State, And Have Often Attained It, Without Managing To Remain There: I Am Too Weak For Such Happiness.

If I Were To Be Totally Sincere, I Would Say That I Do Not Know Why I Live And Why I Do Not Stop Living. The Answer Probably Lies In The Irrational Character Of Life Which Maintains Itself Without Reason.

A People Represents Not So Much An Aggregate Of Ideas And Theories As Of Obsessions.

The Amount Of Chiaroscuro An Idea Harbors Is The Only Index Of Its Profundity.

Consciousness Is Much More Than The Thorn, It Is The Dagger In The Flesh.

Thinking Should Be Like Musical Meditation. Has Any Philosopher Pursued A Thought To Its Limits The Way Bach Or Beethoven Develop And Exhaust A Musical Theme? Even After Having Read The Most Profound Thinkers, One Still Feels The Need To Begin Anew. Only Music Gives Definitive Answers.

We Are So Lonely In Life That We Must Ask Ourselves If The Loneliness Of Dying Is Not A Symbol Of Our Human Existence.

Only Superficial Minds Approach An Idea With Delicacy.

Only Optimists Commit Suicide, Optimists Who No Longer Succeed At Being Optimists. The Others, Having No Reason To Live, Why Would They Have Any To Die?

We Have Convictions Only If We Have Studied Nothing Thoroughly.

Nothing Sweeter Than To Drag Oneself Along Behind Events; And Nothing More Reasonable. But Without A Strong Dose Of Madness, No Initiative, No Enterprise, No Gesture. Reason: The Rust Of Our Vitality. It Is The Madman In Us Who Forces Us To Adventure; Once He Abandons Us, We Are Lost; Everything Depends On Him, Even Our Vegetative Life; It Is He Who Invites Us, Who Obliges Us To Breathe, And It Is Also He Who Forces Our Blood To Venture Through Our Veins. Once He Withdraws, We Are Alone Indeed! We Cannot Be Normal And Alive At The Same Time.

Just As Ecstasy Purifies You Of The Particular And The Contingent, Leaving Nothing Except Light And Darkness, So Insomnia Kills Off The Multiplicity And Diversity Of The World, Leaving You Prey To Your Private Obsessions.

Great Persecutors Are Recruited Among Martyrs Whose Heads Haven't Been Cut Off.

Better To Be An Animal Than A Man, An Insect Than An Animal, A Plant Than An Insect, And So On. Salvation? Whatever Diminishes The Kingdom Of Consciousness And Compromises Its Supremacy.

To Write Books Is To Have A Certain Relation With Original Sin. For What Is A Book If Not A Loss Of Innocence, An Act Of Aggression, A Repetition Of Our Fall?

He Who Has Never Envied The Vegetable Has Missed The Human Drama.

Discretion Is Deadly To Genius; Ruinous To Talent.

To Defy Heredity Is To Defy Billions Of Years, To Defy The First Cell

Consider Love: Is There A Nobler Outpouring, A Rapture Less Suspect? Its Shudders Rival Music, Compete With The Tears Of Solitude And Of Ecstasy: Sublime...but A Sublimity Inseperable From The Urinary Tract: Transports Bordering Upon Excretion, A Heaven Of The Glands, Sudden Sancitity Of The Orifices. It Takes No More Than A Moment Of Attention For This Intoxication, Shaken, To Cast You Back Into The Ordures Of Physiology Or A Moment Of Fatigue To Recognize That So Much Ardor Produces Only A Variety Of Mucous.

The Aphorism Is Cultivated Only By Those Who Have Known Fear In The Midst Of Words, That Fear Of Collapsing With All The Words.

The Truly Solitary Being Is Not The Man Who Is Abandoned By Men, But The Man Who Suffers In Their Midst, Who Drags His Desert Through The Marketplace And Deploys His Talents As A Smiling Leper, A Mountebank Of The Irreparable.

We Would Not Be Interested In Human Beings If We Did Not Have The Hope Of Someday Meeting Someone Worse Off Than Ourselves.

Meeting Someone

What I Know At Sixty, I Knew As Well At Twenty. Forty Years Of A Long, Superfluous, Labor Of Verification.

The Fear Of Being Deceived Is The Vulgar Version Of The Quest For Truth.

Melancholy Redeems This Universe, And Yet It Is Melancholy That Separates Us From It.

Between The Demand To Be Clear,and The Temptation To Be Obscure, Impossible To Decide Which Deserves More Respect.

Society Is Not A Disease, It Is A Disaster. What A Stupid Miracle That One Can Live In It.

I Dream Of A Language Whose Words, Like Fists, Would Fracture Jaws.

I Don’t Understand How People Can Believe In God, Even When I Myself Think Of Him Everyday.

A Book Has To Dig Through The Wounds, More, It Has Cause A New One, A Book It Has To Be Dangerous.

The Mind Is The Result Of The Torments The Flesh Undergoes Or Inflicts Upon Itself.

To Hope Is To Contradict The Future.

All That Shimmers On The Surface Of The World, All That We Call Interesting, Is The Fruit Of Ignorance And Inebriation.

There Is No Means Of Proving It Is Preferable To Be Than Not To Be.

Consciousness Is Nature's Nightmare.

A Great Step Forward Was Made The Day Men Understood That In Order To Torment One Another More Efficiently They Would Have To Gather Together, To Organize Themselves Into A Society

Boredom Dismantles The Mind, Renders It Superficial, Out At The Seams, Saps It From Within And Dislocates It.

Paradise Was Unendurable, Otherwise The First Man Would Have Adapted To It; This World Is No Less So, Since Here We Regret Paradise Or Anticipate Another One. What To Do? Where To Go? Do Nothing And Go Nowhere, Easy Enough.

As Far As I Am Concerned, I Resign From Humanity. I No Longer Want To Be, Nor Can Still Be, A Man. What Should I Do? Work For A Social And Political System, Make A Girl Miserable? Hunt For Weaknesses In Philosophical Systems, Fight For Moral And Esthetic Ideals? It’s All Too Little. I Renounce My Humanity Even Though I May Find Myself Alone. But Am I Not Already Alone In This World From Which I No Longer Expect Anything?

Philosophy: Impersonal Anxiety; Refuge Among Anemic Ideas.

True Contact Between Beings Is Established Only By Mute Presence, By Apparent Non-communication, By That Mysterious And Wordless Exchange Which Resembles Inward Prayer.

Every Form Of Talent Involves A Certain Shameless-ness.

Nostalgia, More Than Anything, Gives Us The Shudder Of Our Own Imperfection. This Is Why With Chopin We Feel So Little Like Gods.

Trending Author

Eugenio Montale

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Category