Emil Cioran Quotes
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
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Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
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We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude...
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I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
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I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
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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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To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.
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Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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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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The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.
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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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One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
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In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.
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The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
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Creation is in fact a fault, man’s famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator’s example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.
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Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
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Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.
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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
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I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.
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What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.