Emil Cioran Quotes
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The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.
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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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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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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...
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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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To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.
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Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.
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To have grazed every form of failure, including success.
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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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Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!
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The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into 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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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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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.
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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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So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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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!
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Once you see that everything is unreal, you can't see why you should bother to prove it.
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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.