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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Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.
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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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A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life
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Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?
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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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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 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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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
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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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Two enemies - the same man divided.
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What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.
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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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It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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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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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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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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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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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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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
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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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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 true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.