Emil Cioran Quotes
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
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The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.
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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
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But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?
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Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.
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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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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
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Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
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The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.
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Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
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One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
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Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.
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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.
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
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Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...