Emil Cioran Quotes
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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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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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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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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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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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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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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A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
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From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.
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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.
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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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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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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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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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The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
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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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It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even 'realities'; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a 'solitary elephant.