Emil Cioran Quotes
-
'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?'
-
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
-
You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.
-
Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.
-
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.
-
Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
-
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
-
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.
-
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.
-
Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
-
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.
-
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
-
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 would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
-
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.
-
All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
-
There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
-
We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
-
Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
-
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
-
Tears do not burn except in solitude.
-
Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
-
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
-
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false.