"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

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

"Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in in them, there is none perhaps more perfectly ruinous than the search a…"

— Adam Smith

Economics

#money

"In a society where commonweal does not exist, there are no duties, only exactations to be avoided, and no freedoms, only privileges to be grabbed. There can be no such thing as "public services" becau…"

— P. J. O'Rourke

Literature1947–2022

#freedom

"Political debate can barely occur in an atmosphere in which people assume words and terms to have distinctly different meanings. They slide, slip and decay. But in the world we are in – where anybody …"

— Douglas Murray

Economics1979

#knowledge

"In Venice, Italy they don't have streets, they have canals. So in Venice, we gotta keep the kids off the canals. In Venice if you're not book smart, but you do know what's going on, you are canal smar…"

— Mitch Hedberg

Entertainment1968–2005

#knowledge