Lara > Lara's Quotes

“Ego-identification with things creates attachment to things, which in turn creates our consumer society and economic structures where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can't let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of "negative growth".”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”
― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“In permitting man, Nature has committed much more than a mistake in her calculations: a crime against herself.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“كلما عشنا أكثر اكتشفنا أنه لم يكن من المجدي أن نعيش.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“لو استطعنا أن نرانا بعيون الآخرين لاختفينا علي الفور.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“أشعر بأني حر لكني أعرف أني لست كذلك.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I shall never utterly admire anyone except a man dishonored — and happy. There is a man, I should say, who defies the opinion of his fellows and who finds consolation and happiness in himself alone.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“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.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self-hatred actually strengthens self-attachment.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco.
...Luckily, there is anxiety, which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Rather in a gutter than on a pedestal.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The only moments I think of with relief are those when I sought to be nothing for anyone, when I blushed at the notion of leaving the slightest trace in the memory of a single human being...”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“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.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“There is no false sensation.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the "end of the world" itself.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

“For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born