Emil Cioran Quotes
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Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
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There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.
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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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The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
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However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them...The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.
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Word - that invisible dagger.
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.
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Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.
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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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In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.
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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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When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, 'What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.' And they do calm down.
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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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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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One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?
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I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
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Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
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Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
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We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?