Emil Cioran Quotes
-
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
-
The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.
-
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
-
Read day and night, devour books-these sleeping pills-not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
-
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
-
It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
-
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
-
If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.
-
If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
-
The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
-
At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.
-
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.
-
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
-
On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.'
-
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
-
Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.
-
One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
-
'Where do you get those superior airs of yours?' 'I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?'
-
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.
-
We are all secularised anarchists today.
-
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?
-
Two enemies - the same man divided.
-
I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.
-
It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?