Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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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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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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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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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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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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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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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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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.
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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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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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As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
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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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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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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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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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Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego… Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?
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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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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.