Thought

Who cares about the purported meaning of life when so much remains unsettled in the method of life?

In the name of religion (Ricard)

Genocide continues to be perpetrated in the name of religion. There are two main forms that intolerance takes. The first is when people who haven't gone deeply into the real meaning of their religion, and don't practice it in an authentic way, use it as a rallying flag to arouse sectarian, ethnic, or nationalist passions. The second is when people who practice their religion sincerely are so deeply convinced of the truth of their beliefs that they think any means are justified to impose them on others, since by so doing they're helping them.

Matthieu Ricard, from The Monk and the Philosopher

Thought

It is easier to judge wrong and avoid it than to determine right and seek it.

More from Cioran (Cioran)

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

***

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion.... Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.

***

Authentic poetry has nothing in common with "poetry."

***

Over the centuries, man has slaved to believe, passing from dogma to dogma, illusion to illusion, and has given very little time to doubts, short intervals between his epochs of blindness. Indeed they were not doubts but pauses, moments of respite following the fatigue of faith, of any faith.

E.M. Cioran, from The Trouble With Being Born

Protecting your solitude (Cioran)

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

E.M. Cioran, from The Trouble With Being Born

Look (Cioran)

Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.

E.M. Cioran, from The Trouble With Being Born

Because we were poor (Mueller)

We sat by the fire in our caves,
and because we were poor, we made up a tale
about a treasure mountain
that would only open for us

and because we were always defeated,
we invented impossible riddles
only we could solve,
monsters only we could kill,
women who could love no one else

Lisel Mueller, from "Why We Tell Stories"

You die without knowing (Merwin)

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write

W.S. Merwin, from "Berryman"

The laws (Housman)

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

A.E. Housman, from Last Poems