Emil Cioran Quotes
-
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
-
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.
-
A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.
-
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
-
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
-
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.
-
I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
-
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
-
If someone incessantly drops the word 'life,' you know he's a sick man.
-
Hope is the normal form of delirium.
-
The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.
-
This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.
-
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.
-
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
-
To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
-
In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
-
For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
-
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
-
Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
-
If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
-
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
-
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
-
I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.
-
If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?