Emil Cioran Quotes
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All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.
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All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
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One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.
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I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
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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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Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
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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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The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.
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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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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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'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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To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
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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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Our first intuitions are the true ones.
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Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.
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The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
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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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To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
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What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.
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You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.
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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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Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
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Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.