Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
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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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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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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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Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.
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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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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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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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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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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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There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
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The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.
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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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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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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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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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'I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.' This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.
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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.