Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
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I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
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If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
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Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.
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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
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We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
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Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
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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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Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
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'Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt.' - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.
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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
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I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.
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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
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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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Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
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The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
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To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.