Emil Cioran Quotes
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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.
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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.
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To think that so many have succeeded in dying!
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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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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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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.
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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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Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
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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?
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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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'Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?' - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
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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.
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In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
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When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
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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.
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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
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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.
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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.
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Awareness of time: assault on time...