Emil Cioran Quotes
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Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
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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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When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
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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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To withstand any truth…
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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.
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Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time.
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Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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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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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.
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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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The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.
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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
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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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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
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He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
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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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If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
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The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.
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There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
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Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.