Emil Cioran Quotes
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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 have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
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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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Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
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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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I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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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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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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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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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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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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One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
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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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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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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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Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
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Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.
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Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.
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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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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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A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.