Emil Cioran Quotes
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Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?
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The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity…
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From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.
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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.
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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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Word - that invisible dagger.
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
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The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.
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The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
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The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
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Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
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Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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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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But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?
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Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them...The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.
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Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.