Emil Cioran Quotes
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For a long time-always, in fact-I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.
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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.
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The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
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Two enemies - the same man divided.
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To suffer is the great modality of taking the world seriously.
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Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.
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The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.
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'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?'
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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.
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To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
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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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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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Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that...
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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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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One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
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Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.
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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.