Emil Cioran Quotes
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To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
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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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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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Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.
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The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
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All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.
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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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I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
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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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To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.
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Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
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Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
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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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If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
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Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.
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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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Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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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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We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.