Emil Cioran Quotes
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
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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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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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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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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 must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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To withstand any truth…
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When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
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This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
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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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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.
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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.
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Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
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'What's wrong - what's the matter with you?' Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...
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Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
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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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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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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
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He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician’s invention.