Emil Cioran Quotes
-
To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
-
The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
-
The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the 'meaning' of life.
-
If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.
-
Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
-
I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
-
Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
-
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
-
'Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt.' - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.
-
All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
-
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
-
If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.
-
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.
-
I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.
-
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
-
Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.
-
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.
-
Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
-
To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
-
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
-
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
-
Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.
-
There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
-
If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, 'what good did it do the occupant to be born?' I now put the same question about anyone alive.