Emil Cioran Quotes
-
All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
-
Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.
-
How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.
-
Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...
-
There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
-
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
-
What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.
-
To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
-
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.
-
One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.
-
'You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again.' - 'Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?'
-
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
-
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.
-
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
-
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.
-
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
-
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
-
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.
-
He who hates himself is not humble.
-
The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.
-
How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
-
By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
-
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
-
Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.