Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
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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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Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
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Hope is the normal form of delirium.
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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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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Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
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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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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
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Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?
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The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
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I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
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Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
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In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
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No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.
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To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.
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The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.
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I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
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What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.
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The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.
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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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The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.