“We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”

History and Utopia (1960)

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 "We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves." by Emil M. Cioran?
Emil M. Cioran photo
Emil M. Cioran 531
Romanian philosopher and essayist 1911–1995

Related quotes

Margaret Atwood photo
Michael Polanyi photo
Shunryu Suzuki photo

“We do not exist for the sake of something else. We exist for the sake of ourselves.”

Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Japanese Buddhist missionary

Source: Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

Swami Vivekananda photo
Aleister Crowley photo

“We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: It has always been fatal when somebody finds out too much too suddenly. If John Huss had cackled more like a hen, he might have survived Michaelmas, and been esteemed for his eggs. The last fifty years have laid the axe of analysis to the root of every axiom; they are triflers who content themselves with lopping the blossoming twigs of our beliefs, or the boughs of our intellectual instruments. We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.

Jean Jacques Rousseau photo
John Gray photo
Fernando Pessoa photo

“There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.”

Ibid., p. 328
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Não há felicidade senão com conhecimento. Mas o conhecimento da felicidade é infeliz; porque conhecer-se feliz é conhecer-se passando pela felicidade, e tendo, logo já, que deixá-la atrás. Saber é matar, na felicidade como em tudo. Não saber, porém, é não existir.

Jim Morrison photo
Socrates photo

Related topics