Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women.
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What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!
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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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I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.
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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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There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.
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How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
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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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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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When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.
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Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
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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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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
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Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
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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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There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
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Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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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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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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One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
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Eternity is absence.
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I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.