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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I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
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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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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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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
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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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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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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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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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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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Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end 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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Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
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There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
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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 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 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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Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.
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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
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It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.