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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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
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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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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
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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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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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One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
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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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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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To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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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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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity…
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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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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
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What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
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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.