Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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To be is to be cornered.
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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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One hardly saves a world without ruling it.
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The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
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We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
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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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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.
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There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
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I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.
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In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.
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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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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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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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All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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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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By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.