Emil Cioran Quotes
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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
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Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
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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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A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy.
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To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.
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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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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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Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
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To fear is to die every minute.
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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 must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
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The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
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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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If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
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An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
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If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.
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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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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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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
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Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.
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I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.