Emil Cioran Quotes
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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.
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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.
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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.
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Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.
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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
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Eternity is absence.
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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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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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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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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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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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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.