Emil Cioran Quotes
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.
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There is no false sensation.
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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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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
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A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.
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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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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 anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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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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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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It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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To withstand any truth…
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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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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...
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Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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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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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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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 need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.
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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.