Emil Cioran Quotes
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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what-it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?
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The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
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Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
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In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.
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To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
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Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
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To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...
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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.
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If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
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I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.
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The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
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By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let 'desire' be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.
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I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.
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We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented-we’re born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt-tone is more than talent, it is its essence.