"One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive."

Emil Cioran Philosophy See all quotes by Emil Cioran →

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“Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!”

“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.”

“Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.”

“Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.”

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

“The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.”

Resonant Thoughts

"We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because …"

— William Butler Yeats

Literature1806–1862

#life

"When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat, and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contrac…"

— Nikola Tesla

Technology1856–1943

#life

"Seventh and Ninth generation Old Hemlocks, I see in them all of those ancestors, not just the bloodline and shape of the skull, but the character, the way they feel. They are all in my heart, not gone…"

— George Bird Evans

Literature1906–1998

#life