Emil Cioran Quotes
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To try curing someone of a 'vice,' of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
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History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
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We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
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Tears do not burn except in solitude.
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Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
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As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
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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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There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
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Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
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Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
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The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
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The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
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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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I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
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Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
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No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
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To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
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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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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.