Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 10)

“For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.”

“A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.”

“There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.”

“I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.”

“To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation…”

“Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.”

“It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.”

“Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”

“At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.”

“When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.”

“Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.”

“Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures.”

“I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.”

“Anxiety — or the fanaticism of the worst.”

“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.”

“Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.”