Emil Cioran Quotes
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The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
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All morning, I did nothing but repeat: 'Man is an abyss, man is an abyss.' - I could not, alas, find anything better.
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Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
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To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.
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Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
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Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
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To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.
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Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.
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At this very moment, I am suffering-as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
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I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
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The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.
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I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
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Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.
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How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.
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As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.
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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
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Buddhism calls anger 'corruption of the mind,' Manicheism 'root of the tree of death.' I know this, but what good does it do me to know?
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Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
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Creation is in fact a fault, man’s famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator’s example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.
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In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.
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I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.