Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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'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 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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The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.
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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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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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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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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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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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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
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In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.
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We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
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Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
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Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.
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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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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.