Emil Cioran Quotes
-
In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
-
One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
-
You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!
-
Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.
-
Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.
-
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
-
Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
-
When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
-
Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
-
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
-
To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...
-
What place do we occupy in the 'universe'? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
-
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.
-
Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.
-
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.
-
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 !
-
Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
-
The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
-
A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
-
Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!
-
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.
-
There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
-
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
-
To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.