Emil Cioran Quotes
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If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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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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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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Reality is a creation of our excesses.
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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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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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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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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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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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Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?
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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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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 we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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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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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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Eternity is absence.
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Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
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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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Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.