Emil Cioran Quotes
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
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When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
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Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
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In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
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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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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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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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Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?
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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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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
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However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
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There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.
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The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.
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Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.
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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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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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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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To fear is to die every minute.
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The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.