Emil Cioran Quotes
-
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
-
We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
-
When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
-
He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician’s invention.
-
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.
-
In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.
-
Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
-
A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
-
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
-
The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
-
If someone incessantly drops the word 'life,' you know he's a sick man.
-
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
-
We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
-
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
-
When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
-
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.
-
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.
-
To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
-
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.
-
'What is truth?' is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to 'How to endure life?' And even this one pales beside the next: 'How to endure oneself?' - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.
-
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.
-
An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
-
'What's wrong - what's the matter with you?' Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...
-
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?