Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Old

Philosophy

The Earth is not flat, though when you arrive at a certain age, it may begin to feel so.

 

 

The sleep of monsters gives birth to reason.

 

 

 

The Workplace. A system of imaginary structures founded upon imaginary relationships.

 

 

One is never too old to learn that one is never too old to learn.

 

 

What an audience wants most from art is to be flattered.

 

 

The greatest distortion of reality is experienced in a romantic relationship.

 

 

What people want most from neighbours is silence.

 

 

 

Some women can make excellent wives, but ruinous ex-wives.

  

Painting. An activity children abandon once they have learned to communicate with language.

 

The well-known quotation is the most debased of currencies.

 

 

Emil Cioran's work is memorably aphoristic without containing a single memorable aphorism.

 

 

The young whose 'whole' life is supposedly ahead of them have already used up a fifth to a quarter of it.

 

To get fired from a job, one needs to be either very good at it or very bad at it.

 

Reincarnation might be best described as the regurgitation of time.

 

We can take comfort from the fact that the distinguished, like the rest of us, are soon extinguished.

 

The question is not what you want to get out of life, but what life wants to get out of you.

 

The stereotype is just one step from the archetype.

 

Continuing to live, continuing to thrive is the greatest revenge.

Most novels are a chore to finish; Finnegans Wake is a chore to even begin.

 

For the religiously minded, a corpse isn't buried, it's planted.

 

Motor racing is the only sport in which all the drama happens away from the field of play.

 

A belief in the afterlife represents the triumph of hope over reason.

 

It is wrong to shout 'Fire' in a packed theatre, not because people may be injured in the ensuing scramble to exit the building but because it will interrupt and possibly ruin the performance on the stage.

 

The devil knows because the devil is.