Emil M. Cioran: Trending quotes (page 11)

“The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.”

“This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal.”

“We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one — any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.”

“Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!”

“Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.”

“If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.”

“We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.”

“Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.”

“Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.”

“What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!”

“A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”

“Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”

“There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.”

“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.”

“Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.”

“A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.”

“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.”

“I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.”

“The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.”