Emil Cioran Quotes
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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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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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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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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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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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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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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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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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 devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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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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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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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.
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To suffer is to produce knowledge.
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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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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in 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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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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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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When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
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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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What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
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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?