Yannis Stavrou, Sunset on Acropolis, oil on canvas
*Emil Cioran, a great philosopher, a great poet...
The philosopher who touches upon the substance of the human nature.
Words are not enough. Let's enjoy some of his quotations...
- Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.-
- Man is the great deserter of being.
- Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.
- From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. "I shall never meet myself again," he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate--in his forgiveness--all beings, all things.
- What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges--the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet--horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the Earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one.
- If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
- The only profitable conversations are with enthusiasts who have ceased being so—with the ex-naïve…Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward knowledge— that impersonal version of disappointment.
- As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.
- What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and consent to exist.
- My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
- We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question.
- I feel I am free but I know I am not.
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Source: Cioran.eu
