B.jacob > B.jacob's Quotes

“The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world.”
― Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist

“A mathematician is an individual who constructs space with 0D particles and then places a bowling ball on this invisible canvas to explain how gravity works.”
― Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist

“I would like to be free, totaly free... free like an aborted child.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
― Emil Cioran

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran

“Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.”
― Emil Cioran

“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.”
― Émile Michel Cioran, The New Gods

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”
― E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“If we could truly see ourselves the way others see us we'd disappear on the spot.”
― Émile Michel Cioran

“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.”
― Émile Michel Cioran

“No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”
― Emil Cioran

“Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.”
― Emil Cioran

“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.”
― Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided: Aphorisms

“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”
― Emil Cioran

“We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.”
― Emil Cioran

“To have committed every crime but that of being a father.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”
― Emil Cioran