-
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
Emil Cioran -
A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.
Emil Cioran
-
Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.
Emil Cioran -
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
Emil Cioran -
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
Emil Cioran -
The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
Emil Cioran -
If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
Emil Cioran -
To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
Emil Cioran
-
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
Emil Cioran -
For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.
Emil Cioran -
Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
Emil Cioran -
The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.
Emil Cioran -
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
Emil Cioran -
I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.
Emil Cioran
-
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
Emil Cioran -
What place do we occupy in the 'universe'? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
Emil Cioran -
If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !
Emil Cioran -
A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
Emil Cioran -
Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
Emil Cioran -
Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
Emil Cioran
-
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
Emil Cioran -
This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.
Emil Cioran -
We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
Emil Cioran -
To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
Emil Cioran