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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Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
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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.
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To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
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The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
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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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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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History proves nothing because it contains everything.
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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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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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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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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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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
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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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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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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
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Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.
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The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.