Emil Cioran Quotes
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Society: an inferno of saviors!
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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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Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.
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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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To hope is to contradict the future.
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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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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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Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
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In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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What are you waiting for in order to give up?
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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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To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.
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Word - that invisible dagger.
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Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
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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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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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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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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.