Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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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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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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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
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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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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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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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The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.
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A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
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When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
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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.
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I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.
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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's wrong - what's the matter with you?' Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...
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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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To withstand any truth…
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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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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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We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
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Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?
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The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity…
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In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.