Emil Cioran Quotes
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Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?
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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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To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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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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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.
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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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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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When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
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I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
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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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As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.
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To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
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If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
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To act is to anchor in the imminent future.