"A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate."

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!”

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

“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.”

“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

"On the military side, we need to get two things right if we only talk about limited air strikes against Isil – and I back international action against Isil – it will be counterproductive. We have to l…"

— Jo Cox

Politics1974–2016

#war

"This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by s…"

— Neal Stephenson

Literature1959

#art

"In any foreseeable future there are going to be thousands and thousands of people who detest and abominate Negroes, communists, Russians, Chinese, Jews, Catholics, beatniks, homosexuals, and "dope-fie…"

— Alan Watts

Philosophy1915–1973

#justice

"Spinoza was the man I believed in always, as the alternative to Catholicism. And it is only in Spinoza's manner that I am a positivist at all. I believe in the real world, in the world of thought and …"

— Baruch Spinoza

Philosophy1632–1677

#mind