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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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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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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Two enemies - the same man divided.
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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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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.
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Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
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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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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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If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.
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Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
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I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.
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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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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.
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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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It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?
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The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.
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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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The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.
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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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What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.
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It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.
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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?