Emil Cioran Quotes
-
We always love...despite; and that 'despite' covers an infinity.
-
Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
-
Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
-
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.
-
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.
-
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
-
I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.
-
History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Tears do not burn except in solitude.
-
If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
-
To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
-
Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
-
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
-
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.
-
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
-
All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
-
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
-
What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.
-
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.