Emil Cioran Quotes
-
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
-
On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.'
-
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
-
The universal view melts things into a blur.
-
Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
-
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.
-
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.
-
One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.
-
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.
-
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?
-
At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.
-
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
-
The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?
-
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
-
If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
-
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.
-
Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.
-
Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.
-
We are all secularised anarchists today.
-
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.