Toste Rydbeck

“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

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”
― Thomas Mann

“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