Emil Cioran Quotes
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To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
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A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
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The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?
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The universal view melts things into a blur.
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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.
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What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.
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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.
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We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.
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To withstand any truth…
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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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I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.
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There is no false sensation.
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The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.
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In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
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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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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
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'What is truth?' is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to 'How to endure life?' And even this one pales beside the next: 'How to endure oneself?' - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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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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For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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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...