When the problem of happiness supplants that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its proper domain to engage in a suspect activity: it concerns itself with man… Questions it would once have scorned asking now attract its attention, and it attempts to answer them in all seriousness. “How is suffering to be avoided?” is the first to entice it. In a phase of lassitude, increasingly alien to impersonal concerns, to the thirst for knowledge, it abandons speculation and to the truths that disturb prefers those that console.
Emil Cioran – The Temptation to Exist