“Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?”

—  Emil M. Cioran

The New Gods (1969)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to sh…" by Emil M. Cioran?
Emil M. Cioran photo
Emil M. Cioran 531
Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911–1995

Related quotes

Pierce Brown photo

“Humans are always negotiating. That's what conversation is. Someone has something, knows something. Someone wants something.”

Pierce Brown book Red Rising

Source: Red Rising (2014), Ch. 41: The Jackal

“As success converts treason into legitimacy, so belief converts fiction into fact, and "nothing is but what is not."”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"That what Everybody Says must be True".
Sketches from Life (1846)

John Angell James photo

“If a man is as passionate, malicious, resentful, sullen, moody, or morose, after his conversion as before it, what is he converted from or to?”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 115.

Richard Feynman photo

“Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know.”

Richard Feynman book The Meaning of It All

lecture I: "The Uncertainty of Science"
The Meaning of It All (1999)

John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge photo

“We must not be guilty of taking the law into our own hands, and converting it from what it really is to what we think it ought to be.”

John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge (1820–1894) British lawyer, judge and Liberal politician

1 Cababe & Ellis' Q. B. D. Rep. 136.
Reg. v. Ramsey (1883)

“For unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia, while belief haunted by doubt involved real suffering.”

Elizabeth Goudge (1900–1984) English fiction writer

The Scent of Water (1963), Chapter 13.2

Orson Scott Card photo

“It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about.”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Source: Enchantment

Amantle Montsho photo

“Invest for the future and do not lose focus. In life you should know what you want then it will not be easy for someone to shift your focus.”

Amantle Montsho (1983) Motswana sprinter

"Simply the Greatest" (2020)

Gary Shteyngart photo

“Remember this… develop a sense of nostalgia for something, or you'll never figure out what's important.”

Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story

Source: Super Sad True Love Story

“Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Related topics