Emil Cioran Quotes
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We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
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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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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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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing
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Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.
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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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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.
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The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
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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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History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
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When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.
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A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
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They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
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The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.
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Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.
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Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
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Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
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It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.
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Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.
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Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.