"The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world."

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

"I thank you for the perusal of citizen Stanhopes letter, which does him great credit, no doubt, in several respects...it being perfectly clear...there is no law or dictum whatever which can render it …"

— Joseph Ritson

Social Activism1752–1803

#philosophy

"...1660 virtually starts a new era - an era in which the old land-owning class sinks and the new middle-class rises, an era too in which the English character seems to have become subtly changed. A se…"

— Anthony Burgess

Music1917–1993

#time

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity — much le…"

— Gore Vidal

Literature1925–2012

#imagination

"he quest for a social world that can better do justice to a being whose most remarkable quality is precisely the power to overcome and revise, with time, every social or mental structure in which he m…"

— Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Philosophy1947

#justice