Emil Cioran Quotes
-
The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
-
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
-
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.
-
The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
-
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.
-
Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
-
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.
-
How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
-
Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.
-
I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
-
There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
-
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
-
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
-
Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
-
'Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt.' - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.
-
The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
-
Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
-
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.