Emil Cioran Quotes
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Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
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What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
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We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
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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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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.
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We are all secularised anarchists today.
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A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
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Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego… Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?
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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
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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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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
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To suffer is to produce knowledge.
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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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The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
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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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In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
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What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.
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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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Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!