Profundity – Quotes

Sometimes I try my

Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God. Etty Hillesum

The amount of chiaroscuro

The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity. Emile M. Cioran

Philosophy is a corrective

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy! Emile M. Cioran

Profundity and originality are

Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds. Edwin Land

By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct. Edgar Allan Poe

Could truth perhaps be

Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be–to speak Greek–Baubo?… Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in … Read more

The public easily confuses

The public easily confuses him who fishes in troubled waters with him who draws up water from the depths. Friedrich Nietzsche

With deep men, as

With deep men, as with deep wells, it takes a long time for anything that falls into them to hit bottom. Onlookers, who almost never wait long enough, readily suppose that such men are callous and unresponsive–or even boring. Friedrich Nietzsche

It is only great

It is only great pain–that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood–that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our … Read more

I am afraid that

I am afraid that old women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of hearts than any man: they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this \”truth,\” a most welcome veil over a pudendum–and so a matter of … Read more