Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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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 only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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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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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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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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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.
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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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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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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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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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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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As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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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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Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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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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It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.