Quotes About Philosophy

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

If there is so much discomfort and ambiguity in lucidity, it is because lucidity is the result of the poor use to which we have put our sleepless nights.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left — ignorant how to react — with a foolish grin.

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

güzellik, tomurcuklar?n içinde ÅŸiÅŸinen ölümden baÅŸka bir ÅŸey deÄŸildir

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant.

Être, c'est être coincé.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion...Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.

We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.

German endurance knows no limits — even in madness: Nietzsche endured his eleven years, Hölderlin forty.

Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.

The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.

In order not to have to resolve them, I have turned all my practical difficulties into theoretical ones. Faced with the Insoluble, I breathe at last. . . .

To that friend who tells me he is bored because he cannot work, I answer that boredom is a higher state, and that we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.

When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous situation, if not worse.

To exist is a state as little conceivable as its contrary. No, still more inconceivable.

Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

It is of no importance to know who I am since some day I shall no longer be"—that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be. — Emil Cioran, The Book of Delusions (? Humanitas, January 1, 1991) Originally publishedJanuary 1, 1936