Emil Cioran Quotes
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The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.
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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
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History proves nothing because it contains everything.
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Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
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For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.
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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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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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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 long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
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As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
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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 don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.
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Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
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What place do we occupy in the 'universe'? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
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Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.
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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
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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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Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
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Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.