Emil Cioran Quotes
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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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For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
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Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
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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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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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It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.
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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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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
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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 think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.
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Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!
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What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?
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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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Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...
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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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…all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
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We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
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To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
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Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?
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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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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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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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This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.