All Quotes

"Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?"

"The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?"

"Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny."

"To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!"

"A person who wakes up after a night of unbroken sleep has the illusion of beginning something new. When one instead remains awake the whole night long, nothing new begins."

"Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all."

"Basically—I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs—life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything."

"Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable."

"The source of an emotion is very difficult to grasp, but it comes to just that. That holds for all phenomena, for faith, etc. Why did it begin, how did it develop? and so forth—only he who has the gift of divination can perceive where it really comes from. But it is not accessible to reflection."

"With success and a literary career one becomes an unquestioning part of the mechanism, whereas the only truly important years are those in which one is unknown."

"I love talking to simple people, with common folk, if you like, and I still do it and still chat now as before with anyone, regardless of intellectual level. On the contrary, I like uneducated people much better and that is obviously my Rumanian heritage."

"I have a weakness for cemeteries, though they aren't so beautiful anymore, because they are simply overpopulated! When I meet friends or people I know who are going through a difficult period, I usually have this advice for them: "Go for twenty minutes in acemetery and you'll see that, though your worry won't disappear, you'll almost forget about it and you'll feel better." Just a few days ago I told a young woman who was suffering fearfully from an unhappy love, "Since you don't live far from Montparnasse, take a walk through the cemetery, just half an hour, and you will see that your misery will appear bearable." In such a situation, it is much better to do that than to go to a doctor; there is no medicine that can help. To visit a cemetery in such a situation is a lesson, a lesson in wisdom! I have always practiced such methods, or recommended them, although it may not seem altogether serious, but it has been effective in every case. What can one say that is meaningful to someone in despair? Absolutely nothing, or almost nothing. My advice shows immediate results."

"I know several writers, young writers, who tried to publish something and were frustrated, whereupon they wanted to take their lives. I understand that in some way, but it is exceptionally difficult to comfort someone who is so far gone. The most shocking things in life are perhaps the great defeats, and there are many of them, for everyone. When one gets to know people in that situation, one experiences the most of them. I am very often visited by people in complete despair, mostly young, who feel that they have failed. It is quite an extraordinarily important lesson, for there are people for whom it is not easy to go through such a crisis; it is a matter of sensitivity, of nerves, possibly even something inherited. Nevertheless, there are these crises in every social sphere and one must say that, fundamentally, failure merely constitutes the experience of life. That is really not so bad for the one who comprehends everything—what can happen to him? But it hits the ambitious exceptionally hard, those who have a plan for their lives, who think about the future, who have a future. Just because they take everything so seriously, I say to these people, "Go to the cemetery!" and it is right, and the results prove it. It is the only weapon with which to minimize such an essentially tragic situation.... Best of all, go find the grave of a friend! It is perhaps absurd and yet it has not only meaning, but is, as I said, the only way to alleviate a personal drama. One learns in life just about everything but this, how to survive such a crisis. And in literary circles, which are often afflicted in this regard, there is certainly a lot of disappointment."

"As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I've read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti."

"...the greatest French writer to honour our language since the death of Paul Valery."

"...the most distinguished figure in the tradition since Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein."

"As Cioran correctly points out, a principal danger of being overcivilized is that one all too easily relapses, out of sheer exhaustion and the unsatisfied need to be "stimulated," into a vulgar and passive barbarism. Thus, "the man who unmasks his fictions" through an indiscriminate pursuit of the lucidity that is promoted by modern liberal culture "renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depth." There, he concludes, "no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.""

"Rien ne réussit comme le succès."

"Sleeping on a plank has one advantage — it encourages early rising."

"My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends."

"Tous pour un, un pour tous, c'est notre devise"

"Eh, gentlemen, let us reckon upon accidents! Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin."

"Weep," said Athos, "weep, heart full of love, youth, and life! Alas, would I could weep like you!"

"You are young, and your bitter recollections have time to change themselves into sweet remembrances.""

"Learn ever to separate the king and the principle of royalty. The king is but man; royalty is the spirit of God. When you are in doubt as to which you should serve, forsake the material appearance for the invisible principle, for this is everything."

"Eh! sire, that is the fate of truth; she is a stern companion; she bristles all over with steel; she wounds those whom she attacks, and sometimes him who speaks her."

"My friend, the pleasures to which we are not accustomed oppress us more than the griefs with which we are familiar."

"Cherchez la femme, pardieu ! cherchez la femme !"

"Il y a une femme dans toutes les affaires ; aussitôt qu'on me fait un rapport, je dis : «Cherchez la femme !»"

"Les chaînes du mariage sont si lourdes qu'il faut être deux pour les porter ; quelquefois trois."

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

"For many years, I used to take The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas with me anytime I traveled. I’ve probably read it 20 or more times."

"Although I work, and seldom cease, At Dumas père and Dumas fils, Alas, I cannot make me care For Dumas fils and Dumas père."

"I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac."

"List of films (A–C)"

"List of films (D–F)"

"Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics."

"Wir dürfen nicht denen glauben, die heute mit philosophischer Miene und überlegenem Tone den Kulturuntergang prophezeien und sich in dem Ignorabimus gefallen. Für uns gibt es kein Ignorabimus, und meiner Meinung nach auch für die Naturwissenschaft überhaupt nicht. Statt des törichten Ignorabimus heiße im Gegenteil unsere Losung:"

"The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality."

"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."

"Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country."

""Mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker, or the assumption of a special faculty of our understanding attuned to the principle of mathematical induction, as does Poincaré, or the primal intuition of Brouwer, or, finally, as do Russell and Whitehead, axioms of infinity, reducibility, or completeness, which in fact are actual, contentual assumptions that cannot be compensated for by consistency proofs."

"If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology."

"If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?"

"One of the supreme achievements of purely intellectual human activity."

"But he (Galileo) was not an idiot,... Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom — that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time."

"Sometimes it happens that a man's circle of horizon becomes smaller and smaller, and as the radius approaches zero it concentrates on one point. And then that becomes his point of view."

"Keep computations to the lowest level of the multiplication table."

"Immer mit den einfachsten Beispielen anfangen."

"I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as a Privatdozent. After all, the Senate is not a bath-house."