Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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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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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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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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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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Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
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Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
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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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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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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
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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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Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
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The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
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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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Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.
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If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.
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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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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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That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
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We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
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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.