Emil Cioran Quotes
-
I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
-
Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
-
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?
-
Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
-
We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
-
Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
-
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.
-
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
-
To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
-
Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
-
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.
-
What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
-
The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.
-
His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
-
Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
-
Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
-
What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
-
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
-
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 !