“Neither Happiness Nor Sadness Are Inbuilt In The Events And Circumstances Showing Up. All That Appears

EMIL M. CIORAN

The Trouble with Being Born, or De l’inconvénient d’être né (1998), translated by Richard Howard;

original photos and edit

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”

— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (via books-n-quotes)

“The first thing to realize, if you wish to become a philosopher, is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing

“How far can you go down the wrong path before you can’t get back on the right one?”

— Carolee Dean, Take Me There (via books-n-quotes)

I have nothing to do with this mission, but damn do I feel proud. What peculiar beings we, humans, are. Sending into space a doll in a spacesuit, named “Starman”, seated in an electric car, with a sign “Don’t Panic” on the car’s dashboard, blasting David Bowie’s “Life On Mars?”. I’m not crying, you are.

“I want to live before I die. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

— Jenny Downham, Before I Die (via books-n-quotes)

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (via books-n-quotes)

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.

- Emil Cioran