Emil Cioran Quotes
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Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
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Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
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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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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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Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
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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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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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The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.
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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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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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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
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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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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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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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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?
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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.
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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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Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
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When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.