18 Thought-Provoking Rust Cohle Quotes That’ll Chill You To The Bone

Rust Cohle, Matthew McConaughey’s nihlistic tour de force on True Detective, will undoubtedly go down as one of the most compelling characters in modern television. Known for his detached, cold, and brilliant-but-unsettling worldview, Rust dropped quite a few philosophical gems during the season’s 8 episode run:

True Detective
True Detective

1.

 I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

2.

Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.

3.

 I know who I am. And after all these years, there’s a victory in that.

4.

Of course I’m dangerous. I’m police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.

5.

If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then, brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible. You gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day? What’s that say about your reality?

6.

Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-VkdLS4310&w=853&h=480]

7.

You see we all got what I call a life trap, a gene deep certainty that things will be different… that you’ll move to another city and meet the people that’ll be the friends for the rest of your life… that you’ll fall in love and be fulfilled… fucking fulfillment… and closure whatever the fuck those two fuckin’ empty jars to hold this shit storm. Nothing’s ever fulfilled, not until the very end. and closure. Nothing is ever over.

8.

“Death created time to grow the things that it would kill.”

9.

“It’s all one ghetto man, giant gutter in outer space.

10.

“I don’t think men can love.”

11.

“I think about my daughter now, and what she was spared. Sometimes I feel grateful. The doctor said she didn’t feel a thing; went straight into a coma. Then, somewhere in that blackness, she slipped off into another deeper kind. Isn’t that a beautiful way to go out, painlessly as a happy child? Trouble with dying later is you’ve already grown up. The damage is done, it’s too late.”

12.

The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it’s such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn’t it?

13.

“The newspapers are gonna be tough on you. And prison is very, very hard on people who hurt kids. If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself.”

14.

“I’m the person least in the need of counseling in this entire fucking state.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTnNsIgQArM%5D

15.

Sometimes I think I’m just not good for people, that it’s not good for them to be around me. I wear ’em down. They… they get unhappy.

16.

“People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.”

17.

People… I have seen the finale of thousands of lives, man. Young, old, each one so sure of their realness. You know that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual with purpose and meaning. So certain that they were more than biological puppet. The truth wills out, and everybody sees. Once the strings are cut, all fall down.

18.

Well, if the common good has got to make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.  Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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