Emil Cioran Quotes
-
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
-
We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
-
The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
-
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
-
Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.
-
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
-
I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.
-
Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
-
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
-
The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.
-
If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
-
If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
-
The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.
-
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.
-
Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
-
What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
-
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
-
We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.
-
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
-
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
-
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
-
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
-
Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.
-
The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!