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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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.
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A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.
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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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There is no false sensation.
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For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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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.
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One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
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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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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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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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I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.
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I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
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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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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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Creation is in fact a fault, man’s famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator’s example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.
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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
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Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
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'Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
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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.