Emil Cioran Quotes
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We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
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I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
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Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
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Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
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Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.
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Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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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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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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Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
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As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.
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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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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
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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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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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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?
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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
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A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.
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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.