Emil Cioran Quotes
-
The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide...
-
I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
-
Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.
-
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
-
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
-
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
-
Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
-
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.
-
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
-
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.
-
One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.
-
How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.
-
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.
-
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
-
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
-
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
-
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.
-
Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
-
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.
-
The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.