Emil Cioran Quotes
-
Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
-
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!
-
Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
-
We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
-
There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
-
Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
-
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
-
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.
-
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 !
-
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.
-
When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
-
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.
-
The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
-
In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.
-
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
-
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.
-
If someone incessantly drops the word 'life,' you know he's a sick man.
-
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
-
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
-
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.
-
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.