Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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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.
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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 a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.
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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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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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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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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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If someone incessantly drops the word 'life,' you know he's a sick man.
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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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What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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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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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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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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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
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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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'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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What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!
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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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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.