Emil Cioran Quotes
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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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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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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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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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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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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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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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.
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To fear is to die every minute.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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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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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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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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To suffer is to produce knowledge.
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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 act is to anchor in the imminent future.
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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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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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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.