Random Thoughts https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2004/12/06/random-thoughts-n996213, Townhall, December 2004.
2000s
“There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons — moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on — no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.”
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Emil M. Cioran 531
Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911–1995Related quotes
The Autobiography of Margot Asquith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) p. 63. (1920).
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 59.
Daniel Buren in an 1968 interviewer, cited in: Andrew Russeth, " Daniel Buren Shows His Stripes: The Celebrated Artist’s Two-Gallery Show Is On, After a Sandy Delay http://observer.com/2013/01/daniel-buren-shows-his-stripes-the-celebrated-artists-two-gallery-show-is-on-after-a-sandy-delay/#ixzz3bQq73uPq." at observer.com, 01/08/13
1960s
The Spectrum of Consciousness (1993), Prologue, p. 6
Context: An argument can be legitimately sustained only if the participants are speaking about the same level. Argumentation would — for the most part — be replaced with something akin to Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. Information from and about the different vibratory levels of bands of consciousness — although superficially as different as X-Rays and radio waves — would be integrated and synthesized into one spectrum, one rainbow. … Each band or level, being a particular manifestation of the spectrum, is what it is only by virtue of the other bands. The color blue is no less beautiful because it exists along side the other colors of a rainbow, and "blueness" itself depends upon the existence of the other colors, for if there were no color but blue, we would never be able to see it. In this type of synthesis, no approach, be it Eastern or Western, has anything to lose — rather, they all gain a universal context.
As quoted in D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996) by Leo Hamalian, p. 93
"Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness".
Power, Politics, and People (1963)
“How can one be well… when one suffers morally?”
Source: War and Peace