Emil Cioran Quotes
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By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let 'desire' be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.
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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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Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?
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Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.
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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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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
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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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As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
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A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
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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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Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.
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What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
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A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life
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Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
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Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
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To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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'Where do you get those superior airs of yours?' 'I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?'
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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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By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
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To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
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If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?
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Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.
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Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.
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We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.