Emil Cioran Quotes
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Society: an inferno of saviors!
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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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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The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.
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Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...
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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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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
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What are you waiting for in order to give up?
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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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Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
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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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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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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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Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
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If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
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We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude...
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What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
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The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
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Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
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I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
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Word - that invisible dagger.