Emil Cioran Quotes
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
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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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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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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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We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
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What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
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The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.
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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
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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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A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
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A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!
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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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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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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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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
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For a long time-always, in fact-I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.