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Some quotes, belonging to a philosopher
#1
Some quotes, belonging to a philosopher
Emil Cioran (1911-1995)

Some quotes that sound interesting. The philosopher is Emil Cioran (1911-1995). Don't know if you've heard about him.
I have found the quotes on the Internet. I was curios about your opinions.
(I have gathered other interesting quotes, but were too many to write them all here)
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

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.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
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#2
RE: Some quotes, belonging to a philosopher
I thought about adding the other interesting quotes I found.
Perhaps somebody would find them interesting.

"The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility."
"The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary."
"There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be."
"To act is to anchor in the imminent future."
"To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring."
"To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself."
"To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy."
"To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten."
"Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young."
"Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment."
"Under each formula lies a corpse."
"We are afraid of the enormity of the possible."
"We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves."
"We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void."
"We derive our vitality from our store of madness."
"We die in proportion to the words we fling around us."
"We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves."
"What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation."
"When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves."
"Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave."
"Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone."
"You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life."
"Between a slap and an insult, we always bear better the slap."
"If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an “I” without shame."
"Society : an inferno of saviors."
"Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce."
"Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown."
"I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide."
"All waters have the color of drowning."
"Hope is the virtue of the slave."
"Objection against science: this world does not deserve being known."
"A civilization begins to decay in the moment in which life becomes its unique obsession."
"Opinions, yes; Convictions, no. This is the starting point of the intellectual pride."
"He doesn't have convictions who does not study anything deeply."
"Reality is a creation of our excesses."
"Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor."
"Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy."
"Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself."
"By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing."
"Everything is pathology, except for indifference."
"We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us."
"We cannot sufficiently blame the nineteenth century for having favored that breed of glossators, those reading machines, that deformation of the mind incarnated by the Professor — symbol of a civilization's decline, of the corruption of taste, of the supremacy of labor over whim. To see everything from the outside, to systematize the ineffable, to consider nothing straight on, to inventory the views of others! All commentary on a work is bad or futile, for whatever is not direct is null. There was a time when the professors chose to pursue theology. At least they had the excuse then of professing the absolute, of limiting themselves to God, whereas in our century nothing escapes their lethal competence."
" “Truths”… we no longer wish to bear their burden nor be deceived by them or be their accomplice… I dream a world where one could die for a comma."
"To live… in any sense of the word… is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence."
"To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts."
"Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert."
"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…"
"I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known."
"He who hates himself is not humble."
"When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it."
"I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies."
"To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!"
"No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make."
"There is no limit to suffering."
"A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he was genius, he is doomed to mediocrity."
"We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage."
"We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering."
"A phantom cannot be cured, still less an enlightened mind. We can only cure those who belong to the earth and still have their roots in it, however superficial."
"When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings."
"Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth."
"I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness."
"Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it."
"True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one’s victories as defeats."
"What a pity that ‘nothingness’ has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!"
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#3
RE: Some quotes, belonging to a philosopher
What a depressing bastard he was.

I imagine he didn't get invited to many parties.

Suicide??

I wouldn't be surprised.
[Image: mybannerglitter06eee094.gif]
If you're not supposed to ride faster than your guardian angel can fly then mine had better get a bloody SR-71.
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#4
RE: Some quotes, belonging to a philosopher
(May 23, 2011 at 8:58 am)Zen Badger Wrote: What a depressing bastard he was.

I imagine he didn't get invited to many parties.

Suicide??

I wouldn't be surprised.

He died at 84 years old, old age.

If you are curios about more about his views of life, I've found a site: http://www.rosenoire.org/articles/sunic-cioran.php
[Image: Laughing.gif]
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