Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.
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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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Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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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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'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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The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.
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If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
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We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
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Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what-it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?
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For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
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This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
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It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even 'realities'; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a 'solitary elephant.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.
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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician’s invention.
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.