Emil Cioran Quotes
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So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
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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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Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.
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In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
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You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!
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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
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If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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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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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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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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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even 'realities'; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a 'solitary elephant.
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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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To withstand any truth…
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When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
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A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
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When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.