Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
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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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The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
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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 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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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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The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.
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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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Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
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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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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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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.
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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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When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.
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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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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.
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I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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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.