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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It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!
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In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.
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Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.
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The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
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A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
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I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.
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When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the 'meaning' of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.
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Pursued by our origins…we all are.
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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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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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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
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I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.
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Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.
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Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.