Emil Cioran Quotes
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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'What is truth?' is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to 'How to endure life?' And even this one pales beside the next: 'How to endure oneself?' - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.
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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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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
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It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
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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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In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.
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A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
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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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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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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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In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
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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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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
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The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.