Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
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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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Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
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The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.
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The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
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A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
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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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Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
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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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In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
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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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To withstand any truth…
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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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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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What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
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Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
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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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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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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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Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.