"What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification."

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

"The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes. As in the case of the Negro, women themselves have often been brought to believe in…"

— Gunnar Myrdal

Economics1898–1987

#knowledge

"The problem with the religious solution was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellec…"

— Steven Pinker

Psychology1954

#knowledge

"“It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the publi…"

— Isaac Asimov

Science1920–1992

#knowledge

"In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest."

— Henry Miller

Literature1891–1980

#knowledge