Emil Cioran Quotes
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On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.'
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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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Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...
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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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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what-it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?
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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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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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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 poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
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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 is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
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To suffer is to produce knowledge.
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If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
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The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.
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To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
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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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Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.
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In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.