Emil Cioran Quotes
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Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
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Word - that invisible dagger.
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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 anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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'What do you do from morning to night?' 'I endure myself.'
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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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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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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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Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
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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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If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.
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To think that so many have succeeded in dying!
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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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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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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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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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To fear is to die every minute.
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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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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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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
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When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
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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?