Emil Cioran Quotes
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We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
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Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.
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How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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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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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.
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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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To think that so many have succeeded in dying!
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History proves nothing because it contains everything.
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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.
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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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I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
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Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
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It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
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Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
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Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
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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.