Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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'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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When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.
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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
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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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Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
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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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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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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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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!
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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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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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Pursued by our origins…we all are.
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The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the 'meaning' of life.
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Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.
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It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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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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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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The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.