Emil Cioran Quotes
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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.
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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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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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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
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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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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
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Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
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To think that so many have succeeded in dying!
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Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
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The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.
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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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The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
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His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
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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?
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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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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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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.