Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
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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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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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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, 'What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.' And they do calm down.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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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.
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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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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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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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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
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The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
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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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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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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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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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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them...The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.