Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
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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.
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Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
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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.
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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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There is no false sensation.
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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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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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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.
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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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.
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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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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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 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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I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.