Emil Cioran Quotes
-
I long to be free-desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
-
I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.
-
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
-
Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
-
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
-
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?
-
Hope is the normal form of delirium.
-
The universal view melts things into a blur.
-
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.
-
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
-
The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
-
Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
-
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 !
-
Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
-
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
-
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
-
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.
-
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
-
To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
-
Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
-
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.
-
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
-
To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
-
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.