Ohyeah > Ohyeah's Quotes

“Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.”
― Emil Cioran

“To accomplish nothing and die of the strain”
― Emil Cioran

“I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.”
― Emil Cioran

“Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.”
― Emil Cioran

“The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“God does not read.”
― Emil Cioran

“I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.”
― Emil Cioran

“Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“Our power resides in our incapacity to know how alone we are.”
― Emil Cioran, The New Gods

“I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night. Although I long for luminous ecstasies, I wouldn't ask for any, because I know they are followed by great depressions. I would like instead a shower of warm light to fall from me, transfiguring the entire world, a nunecstatic burst of light preserving the calm of luminous eternity. Far from the concentrations of ecstasy, it would be all graceful lightness and smiling warmth. The entire world should float in this dream of light, in this transparent and unreal state of delight. Obstacles and matter, form and limits would cease to exist. Then let me die of
light in such a landscape.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented—we’re born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt—tone is more than talent, it is its essence.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to a form of reality to reality’s detriment.”
― Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.”
― Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

“After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep’s labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets.”
― Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“Any and all water is the color of drowning.”
― Emil Cioran

“Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his inner metamorphosis.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“If only we could reach back before the concept, could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations of what we touch, do what a reptile would do if it were to set about writing!”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone. The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else’s, not even a saint’s. I cannot bear your bothering about my salvation. If I apprehend salvation and flee it, your prayers are merely an indiscretion. Invest them elsewhere; in any case, we do not serve the same gods. If mine are impotent, there is every reason to believe yours are no less so. Even assuming they are as you imagine them, they would still lack the power to cure me of a horror older than my memory.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“You say you're a pessimist, but I happen to know that you're in the habit of practicing your flute for two hours every evening.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. 1

“there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.”
― Albert Einstein, Religion and Science

“There is an innocence in admiration: it occurs in one who has not yet realized that they might one day be admired.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche