Emil Cioran Quotes
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Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
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No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?
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Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?
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Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
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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.
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The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions.
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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
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Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
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Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
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The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.
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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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Tears do not burn except in solitude.
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Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
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Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
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The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
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'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?'
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We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
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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.
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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
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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.
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What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.