Emil Cioran Quotes
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The Creation was the first act of sabotage.
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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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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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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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Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
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Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.
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Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
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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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To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.
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Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
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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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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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Society: an inferno of saviors!
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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth...
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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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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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We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
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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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I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.
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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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The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.