Emil Cioran Quotes
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What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.
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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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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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In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.
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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
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Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.
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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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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
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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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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
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The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
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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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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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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.
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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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Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
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Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
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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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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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The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.
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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.