Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
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Awareness of time: assault on time...
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Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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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.
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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 !
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The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
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Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.
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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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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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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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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.
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We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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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.
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What place do we occupy in the 'universe'? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.