léo > léo's Quotes

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.”
― E. M. Cioran

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation.”
― Ibn Rushd, Averroes: Antología