Emil Cioran Quotes
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We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.
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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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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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The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.
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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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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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Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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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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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.
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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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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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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.
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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
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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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Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
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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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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.