“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Dec. 30, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?" by Emil M. Cioran?
Emil M. Cioran photo
Emil M. Cioran 531
Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911–1995

Related quotes

Brian Cox (physicist) photo

“We have written the evidence of our existence onto the surface of our planet. Our civilisation has become a beacon, that identifies our planet as home to life.”

Brian Cox (physicist) (1968) English physicist and former musician

Summing up the documentation Wonders of the Solar System, episode 5

George MacDonald photo

“Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

From "Life" in Unspoken Sermons Series II (1886)
Context: "In the midst of life we are in death," said one; it is more true that in the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow — a word for that which cannot be — a negation, owing the very idea of itself to that which it would deny. But for life there could be no death. If God were not, there would not even be nothing. Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.

Reinaldo Arenas photo

“In exile one is nothing but a ghost ... I ceased to exist when I went into exile.”

Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) Cuban poet/novelist/playwright

Source: From Arenas’ work Before Night Falls (as quoted in “On Exile and the Longing for Home: Cuban Writer Reinaldo Arenas” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/on-exile-and-the-longing-_b_4451017; 2014 Feb 18)

Kate DiCamillo photo

“Don't we all live in our heads? Where else could we possibly exist? Our brainsthe universe.”

Kate DiCamillo (1964) American children's writer

Source: Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

Daniel Salamanca photo
Gloria Estefan photo

“However long we live here, however much I feel at home in Miami, I -- like everyone else -- am an exile, an exile who cannot go home.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

cubanet.org (May 15, 2000)
2007, 2008

“If we exiled our sins, our virtues would get lonely without their old sparring partners.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 31

Elie Wiesel photo
Herbert Read photo

“We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Foreword (1956), to The Rebel (1951) by Albert Camus
Other Quotes
Context: All revolutions in modern times, Camus points out, have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State.
"The strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror." The counterrevolutions of fascism only serve to reinforce the general argument.
Camus shows the real quality of his thought in his final pages. It would have been easy, on the facts marshaled in this book, to have retreated into despair or inaction. Camus substitutes the idea of "limits." "We now know, at the end of this long inquiry into rebellion and nihilism, that rebellion with no other limits but historical expediency signifies unlimited slavery. To escape this fate, the revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore, return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits." To illustrate his meaning Camus refers to syndicalism, that movement in politics which is based on the organic unity of the cell, and which is the negation of abstract and bureaucratic centralism. He quotes Tolain: "Les etres humains ne s'emancipent qu'au sein des groupes naturels" — human beings emancipate themselves only on the basis of natural groups. "The commune against the State... deliberate freedom against rational tyranny, finally altruistic individualism against the colonization of the masses, are, then, the contradictions that express once again the endless opposition of moderation to excess which has animated the history of the Occident since the time of the ancient world." This tradition of "mesure" belongs to the Mediterranean world, and has been destroyed by the excesses of German ideology and of Christian otherworldliness — by the denial of nature.
Restraint is not the contrary of revolt. Revolt carries with it the very idea of restraint, and "moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion. It is a perpetual conflict, continually created and mastered by the intelligence.... Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

T. H. White photo

Related topics