“The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies.”
The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.
The Book of Delusions (1936)
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Emil M. Cioran 531
Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911–1995Related quotes
“There is no right reaction. There is only your reaction.”
Source: Chicken Soup for the Soul
Of her film Carry on Screaming http://www.allthingshorror.co.uk/#/fenella-fielding/4529104641
“You can only control your own actions. Not other people’s reactions.”
Source: Something Blue
“Thought shattering itself against its own nothingness is the explosion of meditation.”
1970s, Krishnamurti's Notebook (1976)
Session 830, Page 148
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, (1981)
“Defiance is the reaction against activity (aggression) of the environment.”
Sadism and Masochism : The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, Vol. 1 (1939), p. 46
Context: An intense, unyielding stubbornness hides beneath an apparent obedience (the patient brings a vast number of dreams; his associations become endless; he produces an inexhaustible number of recollections, which seem to him very important but are actually of little moment; or he goes off upon some byroad suggested by the analyst and leads the latter into a blind alley).
The child manifests the same reactions of defiance and obedience. The child, too, can hide his stubbornness behind an excessive docility (the parent's command: You must be industrious. Industry may become a mania so that the child neither goes out nor has time to sleep). Obedience is the giving up of the resistance; obstinacy the setting up of fresh resistances. This resistance is externally active. We have in recent years had sufficient opportunity to observe the law of resistance (the passive resistance). Activity and defiance show great differences. Defiance is the reaction against activity (aggression) of the environment. It may then manifest itself actively or passively and stands in the service of the defensive tendency of the ego. Every resistance reveals the ego (one's own) in conflict with another.