Emil Cioran Quotes
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When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
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To withstand any truth…
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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
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Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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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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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.
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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
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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.
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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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A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
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We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
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'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...
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The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
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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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'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.
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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.
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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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.